HPCwire: NASA Ames Uses cPacket for Network Monitoring

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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.

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Source: cPacket Networks

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