Obsidian Longbow InfiniBand Range Extending Routers Enable a 20Gbits/s Military Prototype Network at Supercomputing 2007

20Gbits/s Wide Area IB Storage Demo — Supercomputing 2007 — Booths #2623 and #703

RENO, Nevada - November 6, 2007 — Six Longbow XR devices from Obsidian, the leader in InfiniBand range extension, will be deployed in Reno and Washington D.C. to drive InfiniBand traffic across Wide Area Networks (WANs) as part of a three-site demonstration of high-performance storage wide area networking. The demonstration, architected and organized by Dr. Henry Dardy's team at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL — Washington D.C.), mirrors a small segment of an expanding inter-continental network behind the ongoing "Joint Capabilities Technology Demonstration — Large Data" (JCTD-LD) project.

The JCTD-LD is the pilot program of a future system comprising globally distributed InfiniBand storage, server farms and workstations gathering, archiving, processing and rendering very large datasets to support U.S. military and intelligence communities. InfiniBand was selected as the underlying System Area Network for reasons of performance and scalability, and Obsidian's routing range-extenders provide a means for multiple remote locations to be transparently connected in the InfiniBand domain. In this demonstration, two 10Gigabit Ethernet links carried by National Lambda Rail (NLR) connect four trunked Longbow XR devices connecting to local InfiniBand networks in Reno and Washington D.C., where InfiniBand storage equipment is located. Additional InfiniBand storage is directly connected in the National Center for Data Mining (NCDM) booth (#2623), from where a connection is made across SCinet's routed InfiniBand network — using a further pair of Longbow XR devices — to YottaYotta's booth (#703), reaching a third InfiniBand storage location.

"Obsidian's Longbow XRs support sustained line-rate transport of huge data files over great distances," explained Dr. Henry Dardy. "This capability is very important to the Large Data JCTD which faces Petascale storage and transport requirements. Several Longbow XR units have sustained continuous 24/7 traffic flows in the field since power-on in late 2006. InfiniBand routing is deployed in this network in Reno for scalability, manageability and security reasons — Obsidian is first out of the gate with this new capability, which we are watching very closely."

Dr. David Southwell, President and CEO of Obsidian Research Corporation, said, "We are very pleased to be participating as part of the system solution within the JCTD-LD program, and are committed to continued innovation to meet the high performance InfiniBand technology requirements of the military and intelligence communities."

About Obsidian:
Obsidian Research Corporation and the Obsidian Longbow LP are the developers of Longbow, a series of InfiniBand range extension products. 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. Obsidian is available online at www.obsidianresearch.com.

About Naval Research Laboratory:
NRL is the corporate research laboratory for the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps and conducts a broad program of scientific research, technology and advanced development. NRL has served the U.S. Navy and the nation for over 80 years and continues to meet the complex technological challenges of today's world. Dr. Henry Dardy is the Chief Scientist for Advanced Computation at NRL, and leads the JCTD-LD program. NRL is available online at www.nrl.navy.mil. JCTD-LD is available only at www.largedata.net.