The NASA Ames Research Center will do some serious long-haul visualization work from the SC09 show floor courtesy of a pair of Obsidian Longbow E100 long-haul Infiniband devices. The remote viz sessions will be driven directly from the Columbia supercomputer on the Mountain View, CA machine floor via 20Gbps encapsulated Infiniband.
NASA’s high-end computing users are distributed across the country,” said Alan Powers, HPC technical director of CSC at the NASA Advanced Supercomputer (NAS) facility at Ames, “so it is highly advantageous to be able to share access to supercomputing resources and provide secure high speed data transfers — including remote real-time visualization — without compromising fidelity or security.”
Obsidian’s Dr. David Southwell observes, “Remote visualization applications are very demanding on the network, being bandwidth intensive and sensitive to latency, loss, arrival time jitter and quality of service. NASA’s InfiniBand-based supercomputers interface naturally to Obsidian’s Longbow E100 products, which transparently extend InfiniBand over 10 GbEthernet WAN connections in a manner that preserves all of InfiniBand’s properties (such as determinism and lossless flow control) while simultaneously applying standards-based AES-192-GCM cryptography.”
The demonstration will utilize a pair of 10Gbps circuits to carry the 20Gbps signal data to a multi-panel wall on the show floor. The data assets at either end of the connection are protected via the Longbow E100’s authentication and encryption functions, without degradation of performance. For more info, read the full release here and check out NASA at booth #1947.
