HPCwire: NASA Ames Uses cPacket for Network Monitoring

The Leading Source for Global News and Information Covering the Ecosystem of High Productivity Computing

HPCwire >> Industry >> Academia & Research

June 25, 2009

NASA Ames Uses cPacket for Network Monitoring

Real-time situational awareness in demanding supercomputing environment

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., June 25 -- cPacket disclosed today that the Emergent Network Technology Testbed group at NASA Ames Research Center is utilizing cPacket's cTap "intelligent network taps" for wire-speed monitoring of NASA links up to 10 gigabits per second. cTaps provide the group with real-time situational awareness of network behavior and traffic, and a wide variety of troubleshooting and analysis capabilities not previously available at these data rates. cTaps support the agency's High End Computing Capability (HECC) project, which includes Pleiades, the world's third fastest supercomputer.

"Because of our tradition of delivering mission-critical applications that push all technical boundaries, we often rely heavily on network monitoring tools such as cTaps," commented Dave Hartzell, CSC Network Engineer and member of the Emergent Network Technology Testbed group. "cPacket's technology enables more effective network monitoring and analysis of our 10 gigabit WAN and LAN; we have greater visibility into our network links, providing us with in-depth, real-time information regarding traffic and performance metrics."

NASA's Pleiades supercomputer -- which has 51,200 processor-cores and is capable of 609 trillion floating point calculations per second -- is used for NASA projects such as combined ocean and atmosphere climate change modeling, large computational simulations of future space vehicle designs, and increasingly detailed models of dark matter and the evolution of galaxies.

cPacket is the inventor of "complete packet inspection," a chip-based technology that is capable of inspecting every bit in every packet of high-speed network traffic -- both header and data payload -- and then selectively monitoring and controlling the traffic based upon these inspections. The cTap is a small network appliance that occupies one slot in an equipment rack and utilizes cPacket's unique complete packet inspection chip. The cTap can transparently be "dropped in" to any 10 gigabit fiber network segment to begin its fine-grained monitoring and management functions. It also features packet filtering, mirroring, forwarding, and timestamps through dedicated 10G and 1G Ethernet ports.

The deployment of cTaps enables network traffic visibility and behavioral monitoring, selective drill-down, troubleshooting and debugging, packet loss and compliance to service level agreements (SLAs), and an overall centralized view of performance, capacity, and availability across multiple 10 gigabit links.

"HECC has a reputation as one of the most demanding computational and network environments in the world," said Rony Kay, cPacket founder and CEO. "We are delighted to play a role in NASA's mission to better understand our world and our universe."

About cPacket Networks

cPacket Networks is the leader in chips and technologies that offer breakthrough, "complete" packet inspection, at a fraction of the complexity, power, or cost of preexisting approaches. It provides manufacturers of routers, switches and other network appliances a low-impact means to easily drop game-changing, wire-speed active network traffic analysis and response directly into their existing or planned designs -- whether targeted at the service providers, the enterprise, or the small office. The exploding use of networks for media-centric applications makes the availability of truly pervasive deep packet inspection timely and crucial. cPacket was founded in 2003 and is located in Mountain View, Calif. For more information, visit www.cpacket.com.

-----

Source: cPacket Networks

Article Tools

Share Options

(Digg, Technorati, more)

Subscribe

Subscribe to HPCwire

Discussion

There are 0 discussion items posted.

Join the Discussion

You must be a registered user in order to comment on HPCwire stories.

Members enjoy:

	Access to Special Content, including Podcasts, Webcasts, and Whitepapers and more!
	Ability to take an active role in the discussions that are shaping the HPC technology discipline!
	Special offers available only to HPCwire members!

Become a Registered User Today!

Registered Users Log in Here to Comment

Email Address:	Password (case sensitive)

Remember me	Forgot Password?

RSS Feeds

Feeds by Topic

Feeds by Industry

Feeds by Content Type

Feature Articles

Chips Ahoy: Vendors Show Off Their Latest Silicon

Chipmakers converged on San Francisco this week to talk up their newest semiconductor products at the International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC). Of particular interest to the HPC crowd are Intel's Westmere EP and "Tukwila" Itanium 9300, and IBM's POWER7.
Read More...

The Week in Review

TACC's Ranger supercomputer celebrates its second year of enabling important research; Microsoft partners with NSF to bring cloud services to researchers; and NSF submits its fiscal year 2011 budget request. We recap those stories and more in our weekly wrapup.
Read More...

NASA Looks to Move Science Apps Into the Cloud

It seems only natural that the US space agency would be casting its eyes toward the clouds. Sure enough, NASA is now looking to cloud computing to optimize the operation of the agency's IT infrastructure for some of its science codes. Like many commercial businesses and government organizations, NASA is being asked to do more computing with fewer datacenter resources.
Read More...

Read more HPCwire features...

Top Headlines

IBM Releases Energy Efficient Power7 System

Feb 09 | eWeek Europe | Company says new high-end servers will deliver "intelligent performance." Read more...

Inductive Coupling Packs Flash Drive in a Chip

Feb 09 | EE Times | Wireless technology promises energy-efficient chip-to-chip communication. Read more...

IBM, Microsoft Help Create Montana Supercomputer

Feb 08 | eWeek | A new kind of Rocky Mountain high. Read more...

AMD Aims for GPUs in Mainstream Servers Starting 2012

Feb 08 | Computerworld | Chip maker hopes to bring CPU-GPU processors to servers in two years. Read more...

Graphene Transistors That Work at Blistering Speeds

Feb 05 | Technology Review | IBM has created graphene transistors that leave silicon ones in the dust. Read more...

Read more headlines...

Featured Whitepapers

Virtualization for Aggregation And The vSMP Architecture™

Jan 12 | | In-depth look at vSMP Foundation server virtualization technology, technical implementation, use cases and capabilities. The technical whitepaper provides an architectural overview and details on the three vSMP Foundation products: vSMP Foundation for SMP, vSMP Foundation for Cluster and vSMP Foundation for Cloud.

Copper Cable Technologies for High Performance Computing

Jan 18 | | This white paper discusses Gore’s copper cable assemblies, and how they continue to exceed the standards for providing reliable, cost-effective solutions for high-performance computer applications.

Appro Assists LLNL with Cluster Designed for Extreme Scale Visualization

Jan 11 | | LLNL is home to some of the fastest computers in the world. In 2012, LLNL expects to have the Sequoia supercomputing cluster operational with a projected performance of over 20 PFLOP/s. These systems will focus on strengthening the foundations of predictive simulation through running large suites of complex simulations and then comparing model predictions with experimental data. To visualize this project’s large amount of data, LLNL requested an Appro Supercomputing Cluster specifically designed to support interactive data analysis.

View the White Paper Library

Multimedia

Webcast: Virtualized Data Center Roundtable

Join this online panel discussion for live Q&A with leading industry experts, analysts, and end-users to discuss the latest innovations, best practices, barriers to implementation, and measurable benefits of server virtualization with a particular focus on today's real world solutions.

Webcast: Watch SC09 Birds of a Feather Video: Scalable Fault-Tolerant HPC Supercomputers

Learn about scalable fault-tolerant architectures and examples of energy efficient and scalable supercomputing clusters using dual QDR InfiniBand to combine capacity computing with network failover capabilities with the help of programming languages such as MPI and a robust Linux cluster management package.

Webcast: High Performance Computing for a Smarter Planet

LIVE@SCO9: The IBM team discusses new innovations in hardware, software and services that help clients better understand their workloads and get insight from their R&D efforts. Technology demonstrations include the soon-to-be-released Power7 HPC processor, the DCS990 system with 2.4 petabytes of storage, the xCAT management tool, secure HPC cloud computing and more. Winners of two HPCwire Readers' and Editors’ Choice Awards! Take the IBM virtual tour at SC09 or more information go online to: http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/deepcomputing/sc09.html