Obsidian Strategics and A*STAR CRC Launch InfiniCortex Initiative
Industry-First Architecture Capable of Leveraging the Global InfiniBand Network to Efficiently Harness the Power of Remote Supercomputers
EDMONTON, Alberta and SINGAPORE – Nov. 10, 2014 – IDC recently reported that high performance computing (also called supercomputing) has made enormous contribution to scientific, engineering and industrial competitiveness, as well as to homeland security and other government missions. Today the supercomputer industry is faced with the challenge of ramping supercomputer performance nearly 100x to ExaScale by 2020. Obsidian Strategics and A*STAR CRC (Computational Resource Centre) today announced a worldwide collaboration that will result in a galaxy of supercomputers to open the door for global innovations in science, engineering and business.
This initiative is to demonstrate the feasibility of the 100G infrastructure that will lead to the future of global supercomputer developments in architecture and scheduling algorithms.
- InfiniCortex, galaxy of supercomputers – A new architectural approach to meet the challenge of building the next generation of supercomputers by enabling the aggregation of many globally distributed supercomputers into a hive-mind of enormous scale. This pilot program is an example of how research centers, such as A*STAR CRC, can meet the challenge of ExaScale computation, in the same spirit of international cooperation and burden sharing as seen with LHC, ITER and SKA.
- Enabling long-distance connection – Initially developed to meet the needs of military and intelligence community networks, Obsidian’s Longbow technology provides transparent range extension of local area InfiniBand traffic over standard WANs such that remote supercomputer fabrics can merge across global distances. High-grade encryption and authentication functions enable secure international sharing of highly valuable and critical supercomputer resources. For additional information, visit www.obsidianresearch.com/products/longbow.
- Demonstrating feasibility and lasting value – To demonstrate the feasibility and lasting value of the pilot platform, various workloads will exercise the InfiniCortex at SC14, including real-time analysis and control of a plasma physics experiment at the Tokyo Institute of Technology involving distributed data processing concurrently occurring in Singapore, Georgia Tech and equipment at SC14 exhibition floor.
Dr. David Southwell, co-founder and chief visionary officer, Obsidian
Strategics, said:
“Supercomputers have played crucial roles in
military, higher-education, R&D labs and industry for decades. Today,
at the rate data usage is increasing, the uses for high performance
computing have also increased. Most supercomputers today are built
around a very capable open-standard LAN technology called InfiniBand,
but this is limited to very short reach connections. Our work on
mission critical global communication requirements from the U.S.
government has allowed us to pioneer the technology capable of
transparently extending InfiniBand over arbitrary distances. The
result is a highly deployable communications fabric suitable for
demanding applications in not only scientific computing, but also
storage, data center, cloud and enterprise environments. We couldn’t
be more pleased to be a part of this groundbreaking collaboration.”
Dr. Marek Michalewicz, senior director, A*STAR CRC, said:
“As our teams began the extensive process of developing the InfiniCortex
initiative, we realized that we would require input from a variety of
global resources. We are proud to be able to provide the necessary
mathematical tools and related software to develop a geographically
distributed supercomputer of supercomputers based on this global
collaboration between HPC clusters. This demonstration is the
culmination of the extensive efforts of all those involved and we are
looking forward to unveiling the results at SC14.”
Satoshi Matsuoka, leader of the TSUBAME supercomputers at Tokyo Institute of Technology said:
“We are delighted to participate in this international project
to demonstrate the viability of long-range high-bandwidth data
transfer using InfiniBand as the underlying transport. We are
committed to being the frontrunner in not only the computational
science but also in the emerging data science. Today’s results,
achieved with our project partners with heavy assistance from the
National Institute of Informatics, Japan, who administers our national
research network SINET, will pave the way for future international
scientific ‘big data’ infrastructures, which will converge with
the computational ones to provide the global scientific community with
capabilities far beyond what we have today.”
Allan Williams, associate director services and technologies, National Computational Infrastructure, Australia, said:
“Working on this demonstration has provided a valuable insight into the
capabilities of the Longbow technology for long distance IB connectivity
between research communities. It has also enabled a global collaborative
relationship to develop between A*STAR and NCI in a way that was
previously not possible.”
See the InfiniCortex in action and meet the teams at SC14, Ernest N. Morial Convention Center, New Orleans. Obsidian Strategics, booth #548 and A*STAR booth #2520 from November 17–20, 2014. (For more information on SC14, visit sc14.supercomputing.org/)
IDC Real-World Examples of Supercomputers Used for Economic and Societal Benefits: A Prelude to What the Exacale Era Can Provide by Earl C. Joseph, Ph.D., Chirag Dekate, Ph.D. Steven Conway, May 2014.
About Obsidian Strategics
Obsidian Strategics™ is the developer of
Longbow™ and Crossbow™, a series of InfiniBand products featuring
range extension, routing and encryption. Longbow technology allows an
InfiniBand fabric - normally a short-range network used in
supercomputers and data centers - to be securely extended via optical
fiber over global distances. Crossbow technology provides very high
performance routing of InfiniBand traffic between many separate
subnets, enabling unprecedented scalability and manageability.
www.obsidianstrategics.com.
About A*STAR CRC
The Agency for Science, Technology and Research
(A*STAR) is Singapore’s leading public sector agency that fosters
world-class scientific research and talent to drive economic growth
and transform Singapore into a vibrant knowledge-based and innovation-driven
economy. In line with its mission-oriented mandate, A*STAR
spearheads research and development in fields that are essential to
growing Singapore’s manufacturing sector and catalyzing new growth
industries. A*STAR supports these economic clusters by providing
intellectual, human and industrial capital to its partners in
industry. www.a‑star.edu.sg.