Obsidian Introduces Global InfiniBand Fabrics

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David Southwell, Director and Chief Visionary Officer, Obsidian Strategics

David Southwell, Director and Chief Visionary Officer, Obsidian Strategics

In this video, Dr. David Southwell from Obsidian Strategics discusses conventional InfiniBand technology and goes on to describe how the company’s Longbow, Crossbow and Bowman devices enable what is generally considered as an ‘indoor use only’ protocol to be deployed at scale with security over global distances. The resulting Global InfiniBand Fabrics can be used for a variety of purposes including technical computing, big data migration and streaming distribution.

“Obsidian’s products are enterprise-class, commercial off the shelf (COTS) devices supporting the InfiniBand protocol used in Supercomputer and HPC environments. The Obsidian Longbow technology was first developed for use in mission-critical military and intelligence environments that imposed operational requirements new to InfiniBand. The first-generation devices (running at 10Gbit/s) support features never before seen in InfiniBand equipment including subnet routing, in-line encryption and authentication. Next-generation Longbow devices (in development/certification) carry 4X QDR (Quad Data Rate) and 12X QDR InfiniBand links to provide 40 and 100 Gbit/s data flows over long-haul optical connections at very high efficiency.”

In related news, Singapore’s Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR) continues to leverage Obsidian Strategics and optical network partners to consolidate InfiniCortex as a unique research tool.

InfiniCortex is the manifestation of A*STAR’s concept of globally interconnecting supercomputing resources using their native InfiniBand networks to provide streamlined and transparent equipment aggregation. A growing number of partner countries have joined Singapore in this initiative, currently including Australia, Japan, USA, Poland, Czech Republic, France and most recently, Canada.

Dr. Marek Michalewicz, A*STAR CRC’s CEO, said “We are delighted to be able to welcome new partners into the InfiniCortex group and are especially proud to be able to build on the 100G trans-Pacific InfiniBand link segment with a new link supplied by TEIN-CC / GEANT from London east to Singapore, completing circumnavigation of the planet. We have also created an InfiniCloud overlay using native InfiniBand OpenStack to render virtualized HPC resources from hardware physically distributed across four continents.”

More than just a collection of high-capacity optical paths,” said Dr. David Southwell, CVO of Obsidian Strategics, “InfiniCortex is an example of a global InfiniBand fabric, combining extremely efficient transport protocols with high grade cryptography and multiple interlinked native InfiniBand subnets supporting robust and scalable network topologies. Configuration and management is provided by the Bowman Global Fabric Controllers – BGFC.”

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