Government Technology, CA
11-01-07
Ames Laboratory Demonstrates Ultra-Fast PVFS Transport
Obsidian, the leader in InfiniBand range-extension, has announced very high
performance from the Longbow XR InfiniBand router devices deployed at the
Scalable Computing Laboratory at Department of Energy (DOE)'s Ames
Laboratory in Iowa. Researcher Troy Benjegerdes is demonstrating reliable bulk
data transport between remote InfiniBand subnets using the open-source Parallel
Virtual File System (PVFS). PVFS was developed by the DOE to harness the
parallel storage architectures behind cluster-based supercomputers.
"Like many other government labs and agencies, the DOE continues to face
massive growth in the volumes of data it must store and distribute", said Troy
Benjegerdes, "and the traditional use of TCP/IP over Ethernet is proving to be
very difficult to scale to long-haul, high-bandwidth connections. As the DOE
moves into the Petascale Computing Era (10^ 15+ calculations per second) it is
clear that a more efficient and scalable transport solution is needed."
"Obsidian developed the InfiniBand range-extending Longbow XR to
transparently provide native InfiniBand connections across optical Wide Area
Networks (WANs)," said Dr. David Southwell, president and CEO of Obsidian
Research, "InfiniBand flow control has proven to be highly robust and efficient
across high-latency 10Gbits/s long-haul networks -- yielding much higher
efficiencies than TCP/IP while preserving InfiniBand's low CPU overhead
semantics, such as Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA)."
Troy Benjegerdes adapted PVFS to support the Wide Area RDMA services
provided by Obsidian's Longbow XR products. In the Ames Laboratory's booth at
Supercomputing 2007 in Reno, the link can be seen in action over BOREAS and
Internet2 WAN circuits reaching back to Ames Laboratory's high performance
test bed PVFS storage system in Ames, Iowa. The Longbow XRs are operating
in router mode, such that each end of the WAN link can preserve local InfiniBand
subnets, simplifying network security and management.
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
http://www.obsidianresearch.com.
The SCL was created in 1989 as a joint effort of the DOE through Ames
Laboratory and Iowa State University through the Center for Physical and
Computational Mathematics. SCL's mission is to improve parallel computing
through clustering techniques for use in scientific and engineering computation.
For more information, visit http://www.scl.ameslab.gov/.