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JUNE 19, 2008 -- ADVA Optical Networking (search for ADVA), Obsidian Strategics Inc., and Voltaire Ltd. have announced an integrated capability to extend InfiniBand (search for InfiniBand) connections to 50 km without performance degradation. The technology was successfully tested at the University of Stuttgart's High Performance Computing Center (HLRS), which provides systems, tools, and expertise for public and private supercomputing development projects.
Today, InfiniBand is primarily used as a high-performance fabric interconnect for linking a cluster's compute nodes within a high-performance data center. Until now, use of InfiniBand for wide area networks (WANs) has been restricted, due to the inability to transport native InfiniBand traffic over large distances. As such, implementation across computing systems that cover several geographically separated data centers has also been restricted.
The group believes extending InfiniBand across the metropolitan area network (MAN) will allow enterprises to greatly enhance not only their supercomputing but also their disaster-recovery and storage-networking applications, using InfiniBand as the underlying unified network architecture.
To address all these market requirements, ADVA, Obsidian, and Voltaire have partnered to deliver a complete InfiniBand-over-distance technology for HPC and enterprise applications. The major building blocks of the joint solution are director-class InfiniBand switches (Voltaire) interconnected via InfiniBand range extenders (Obsidian) and bit-transparent, low-latency WDM transport devices (ADVA).
The HLRS solution comprised the following elements. More than 500 computing nodes of the new Baden-Württemberg Grid Cluster were clustered via two 288-port Voltaire Grid Director 2012 switches. They were interlinked using Obsidian's short-reach Longbow Campus devices for serializing and range-extending the 4X SDR InfiniBand signal. The ADVA WDM FSP devices (FSP 2000 or FSP 3000) were then used to interconnect the sites using protocol-agnostic DWDM that provided bit-transparent, lowest-latency transport. The whole solution was built using generally available devices.
"High performance, low latency, and its unified fabric capability have made InfiniBand a steadily more popular connectivity solution for inside the data center. Until now, InfiniBand has been limited as an inside-the-data-center solution," says Prof. Dr.-Ing. M. Resch, director of HLRS. "The ability to extend the protocol over distance at full throughput offers totally new HPC scenarios."
"We believe that WDM transport is the natural choice for latency-sensitive, high-throughput protocols such as InfiniBand. Its increasing adoption rate in research networks as well as in the financial industry motivated us to develop a solution that helps to further consolidate data center traffic onto a unified fabric. InfiniBand-over-WDM offers unbridled throughput for enterprises' most demanding applications," says Dr. Christoph Glingener, CTO, ADVA Optical Networking.
Asaf Somekh, vice president of strategic alliances, Voltaire Ltd., says, "InfiniBand has established itself as the advanced interconnect standard of choice to power many of the world's biggest and fastest computer systems and enterprise data centers. This deployment at HLRS shows InfiniBand can be easily extended for scalable WAN storage capabilities."
Adds Dr. David Southwell, president and CEO with Obsidian Strategics, "In the face of the sustained exponential growth of intra- and inter-data center bandwidth demand, we are pleased to work with ADVA Optical Networking and Voltaire, deploying Longbow solutions that unlock the enormous potential of both WDM and InfiniBand technologies for high-performance data transport."
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Visit Obsidian Strategics
Visit Voltaire
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