NCSA
HPCwire

Since 1986 - Covering the Fastest Computers
in the World and the People Who Run Them

Language Flags

Visit additional Tabor Communication Publications

Datanami
Digital Manufacturing Report
HPC in the Cloud
Green Computing Report

Tabor Communications
Corporate Video

Obsidian Delivers Encrypted InfiniBand Link for NASA


AMES, Iowa, Nov. 18 -- Obsidian Strategics Inc., the developer of Longbow, a series of InfiniBand products featuring range-extension, routing and encryption, today announced that NASA will be the first to evaluate the new Longbow E series by connecting NASA Ames Research Center (California) with NASA Goddard (Maryland).

NASA extensively leverages InfiniBand network technology within its capacity and capability high performance computing (HPC) infrastructure, as well as for high-fidelity visualization and storage over dark-fiber links within the Ames campus at Moffett Field.

"NASA Ames was an early adopter of Longbow technology," recalls Dr. David Southwell, president of Obsidian Strategics. "We have enjoyed a close working relationship with the HPC networking team, and we're particularly proud to have seen our Longbow C series enable the Columbia supercomputer expansion project in 2007."

"To maximize collaboration and operational efficiencies, facilitate the exchange of increasingly large datasets, and offer remote interactive visualization services, there is a general desire within NASA to find ways to expand existing InfiniBand fabrics between NASA facilities," says Alan Powers, HPC technical director at CSC. "We have worked with Obsidian to specify the security characteristics necessary for the development of wide-area InfiniBand devices that would meet or exceed NASA's network security requirements. Obsidian has responded with the E series, and we are happy to evaluate this product across our 10-Gigabit Ethernet connections between Ames and Goddard. In NASA's case, security considerations stem as much from the need to protect high-value assets -- such as Columbia -- as from threats posed by unauthorized access to data."

Obsidian's Longbow X series devices are mostly deployed in classified military/ intelligence community environments, and as such are designed to inter-operate with military grade Type-1 encryptors that are not commercially available. Obsidian therefore set about developing a new Longbow device capable of supporting range-extended InfiniBand, inter-subnet routing and an open standards based encryption engine using NSA-approved AES algorithms and SHA-1 authentication. The lossless InfiniBand protocol requires all-hardware data paths that support full line-rate operations -- all functions operate at 10Gbits/s in this first-generation Longbow product, with sub-microsecond device latency.

Obsidian reports that the Longbow E series will be commercially available in early Q2-2009, contingent on successful trials at NASA.

NASA will be demonstrating a pair of E series devices in Austin, Texas, at Supercomputing 2008 (Nov. 17-20) in booth #1343.

About Obsidian Strategics Inc.

Obsidian Strategics is the developer of Longbow, a series of InfiniBand products featuring range extension, routing and encryption. Longbow technology allows an InfiniBand fabric, normally a short-range network used in high-performance computing, to be extended via optical fiber over varying distances. Longbow connects across Campus, Metro or Global networks to offer unparalleled high-bandwidth, low-latency access to InfiniBand compute and storage resources. For more information, see www.obsidianstrategics.com.

For information about NASA's High-End Computing Program, visit http://www.hec.nasa.gov/.

-----

Source: Obsidian Strategics Inc.

Sponsored Links

Accelerate your science with Seneca
One of the first HPC providers installing a 4X NVIDIA Kepler K-20 cluster. Invites you to a free evaluation on Seneca’s NVIDIA K20 Kepler cluster, pre-loaded with AMBER, NAMD, LAMMPS

Webinar: Programming Heterogeneous X64+GPU Systems Using OpenACC
Join Michael Wolfe as he compares the advantages and costs of using both low-level models and the directive-based OpenACC model for programming accelerated heterogeneous systems. Registration is free.

High-Performance Computing in Action
Businesses that want to be on the cutting edge of their industries are increasingly turning to high-performance computing (HPC) solutions to handle complex compute processes and speed up their rate of innovation. Download this Executive Brief to see how businesses in energy, life sciences and entertainment put HPC solutions to work in their operations.

May 24, 2013

May 23, 2013

May 22, 2013

May 21, 2013

May 20, 2013

May 17, 2013

May 16, 2013

May 15, 2013

May 14, 2013

May 13, 2013


Most Read Features

Most Read Around the Web

Most Read This Just In


Feature Articles

Exascale Advocates Stand on Nuclear Stockpiles

In quieter times, sounding the bell of funding big science with big systems tends to resonate further than when ears are already burning with sour economic and national security news. For exascale's future, however, the time could be ripe to instill some sense of urgency....
Read more...

NSF Forges Further Beyond FLOPs

In a recent solicitation, the NSF laid out needs for furthering its scientific and engineering infrastructure with new tools to go beyond top performance, Having already delivered systems like Stampede and Blue Waters, they're turning an eye to solving data-intensive challenges. We spoke with the agency's Irene Qualters and Barry Schneider about..
Read more...

CERN, Google Drive Future of Global Science Initiatives

Large-scale, worldwide scientific initiatives rely on some cloud-based system to both coordinate efforts and manage computational efforts at peak times that cannot be contained within the combined in-house HPC resources. Last week at Google I/O, Brookhaven National Lab’s Sergey Panitkin discussed the role of the Google Compute Engine in providing computational support to ATLAS, a detector of high-energy particles at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
Read more...

Short Takes

NASA Builds 'Climate in a Box'

May 23, 2013 | The study of climate change is one of those scientific problems where it is almost essential to model the entire Earth to attain accurate results and make worthwhile predictions. In an attempt to make climate science more accessible to smaller research facilities, NASA introduced what they call ‘Climate in a Box,’ a system they note acts as a desktop supercomputer.
Read more...

Building Supercomputers with Raspberries

May 22, 2013 | At some point in the not-too-distant future, building powerful, miniature computing systems will be considered a hobby for high schoolers, just as robotics or even Lego-building are today. That could be made possible through recent advancements made with the Raspberry Pi computers.
Read more...

Running Computational Fluid Dynamics in the Cloud

May 16, 2013 | When it comes to cloud, long distances mean unacceptably high latencies. Researchers from the University of Bonn in Germany examined those latency issues of doing CFD modeling in the cloud by utilizing a common CFD and its utilization in HPC instance types including both CPU and GPU cores of Amazon EC2.
Read more...

Computing the Physics of Bubbles

May 15, 2013 | Supercomputers at the Department of Energy’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) have worked on important computational problems such as collapse of the atomic state, the optimization of chemical catalysts, and now modeling popping bubbles.
Read more...

Sponsored Whitepapers

Best Practices in Big Data Storage

05/10/2013 | Cleversafe, Cray, DDN, NetApp, & Panasas | From Wall Street to Hollywood, drug discovery to homeland security, companies and organizations of all sizes and stripes are coming face to face with the challenges – and opportunities – afforded by Big Data. Before anyone can utilize these extraordinary data repositories, however, they must first harness and manage their data stores, and do so utilizing technologies that underscore affordability, security, and scalability.

Progress in Parallel: the Bull Parallel Programming Center

04/15/2013 | Bull | “50% of HPC users say their largest jobs scale to 120 cores or less.” How about yours? Are your codes ready to take advantage of today’s and tomorrow’s ultra-parallel HPC systems? Download this White Paper by Analysts Intersect360 Research to see what Bull and Intel’s Center for Excellence in Parallel Programming can do for your codes.

Sponsored Multimedia

SGI DMF ZeroWatt Disk Solution

In this demonstration of SGI DMF ZeroWatt disk solution, Dr. Eng Lim Goh, SGI CTO, discusses a function of SGI DMF software to reduce costs and power consumption in an exascale (Big Data) storage datacenter.

Cray CS300-AC Cluster Supercomputer Air Cooling Technology Video

The Cray CS300-AC cluster supercomputer offers energy efficient, air-cooled design based on modular, industry-standard platforms featuring the latest processor and network technologies and a wide range of datacenter cooling requirements.

SC12 Editorial Feature HPCwire Soundbite sponsored by ISC

HPC Job Bank


Featured Events


  • June 16, 2013 - June 20, 2013
    ISC'13
    Leipzig,
    Germany

  • June 17, 2013 - June 18, 2013
    Forecast 2013
    San Francisco, CA
    United States





HPCwire Events