NASA Deploys Extended-Range InfiniBand for Columbia

Silicon Graphics News

EDMONTON, Alberta, July 23 — Obsidian Research Corporation, the leader in InfiniBand range extension, today announced that its Longbow Campus products have enabled NASA to relocate 15 percent (1,536 processors) of its high-ranking SGI Altix-based Columbia Supercomputer to another facility and seamlessly connect both locations without any performance degradation. This move allows NASA to free up additional building space in its compute center, to reduce the power and cooling requirements on any single location, and to create multi-site supercomputer clusters that now can scale, perform, and be managed as if they resided in one physical location since the Obsidian Longbow solutions add only 840ns of latency beyond the optical flight time between the two locations. By deploying eight, Longbow Campus products at each end, NASA transparently extends its InfiniBand fabric 3km, provides 8 GB/sec of bandwidth between the two locations, and only adds an additional 2RU worth of equipment that consumes a negligible 150W.
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