Engineers at NASA Ames Research Center (ARC) in Mountain View, California are driving remote simulation visualizations at 20Gbits/s directly from the Columbia supercomputer by extending the machine’s InfiniBand fabric to the SC|09 show floor in Portland, OR using Obsidian Longbow E100 devices.

“NASA’s high-end computing users are distributed across the country,” said Alan Powers, HPC Technical Director, 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”.

In the demonstration, a pair of 10 GbEthernet circuits are used to carry 20Gbits/s of visualization traffic from supercomputers in Mountain View to a multi-paneled display wall in Portland, while the data and assets at either end of the link are protected by the Longbow E100's authentication and encryption functions, which operate at full line rate.

Live demonstrations of real-time visualization driven from NASA supercomputers in Mountain View, California can be viewed in NASA's booth, #1947.