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Obsidian Longbow Project

Overview

This is a joint project between Obsidian Strategics, the developer of Longbow, a series of InfiniBand products featuring range extension, routing and encryption; the DICE program; the Network Based Computing Lab, led by Dr. Dhabaleswar K. (D.K.) Panda at Ohio State University; and the DICE program’s Technical Advisory Panel (TAP), funded through a U.S. Department of Energy grant. The organizations are working together to study the effectiveness and efficiency of Longbow E100 devices for encrypted data movement between high performance computing clusters using a file-level data migration tool called “dsync.”

Challenge

The modern era of supercomputing and large data-centers has brought forth the issue of large data sets that need to be moved back and forth over long distances. The InfiniBand technology already enables high performance network connectivity across wide-area networks (WAN), but a study needs to be done to characterize the performance of interconnects for secure and unsecure data transmissions.

Objective

Obsidian researchers are interested in confirming Longbow's InfiniBand performance on the DICE program’s geographically dispersed real-world test bed. The DICE team installed and evaluated the Longbows at local and remote sites. The project team is seeking quantitative measurements and analyses, comparing the combination of Longbow wide-area InfiniBand solutions and dsync with conventional WAN protocols and cryptographic approaches over long distances.

Results

The results of initial evaluation show that, although the Obsidian WAN routers are capable of seamlessly handling encryption for smaller numbers of streams, there is some overhead introduced as a result of encryption as the number of parallel streams increases. In the future, the team plans to perform more file systems- and data center-level evaluations of the encryption capability offered by the Obsidian Longbow routers.

Ultimate Value

Efforts in moving data are often hindered by data management issues. 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. This technology allows scientists, researchers and engineers the connectivity they need to transfer large files between clusters of clusters for compute, storage and visualization.

 

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