DICE: Data Intensive Computing Environment

Real Testing * Real Data * Real Results

DICE - SCinet Sandbox at Supercomputing ‘10

Click on the button below to download a copy of the SCinet Sandbox final report.

New at SC10! Live, Collaborative Testing in Action. Avetec’s Data Intensive Computing Environment (DICE) program and SCinet conducted a live Research Sandbox (System Area Network Demonstration) project utilizing a geographically diverse high-speed wide-area network (WAN) architecture (10GBs). The project demonstrated and tested encapsulated and encrypted InfiniBand data movement between high performance computing (HPC) clusters. Demonstrations were conducted at scheduled times throughout the conference. DICE is the community’s source for independent, third-party technology and product testing in a real-world environment.

Leading HPC solution providers, listed below, participated and put their solutions to the test. The DICE - SCinet Research Sandbox provided the HPC community with a network architecture verifying that InfiniBand is not only scalable, but can be easily extended over campus, metropolitan and global distances.

What was the DICE – SCinet Research Sandbox?
The DICE – SCinet Research Sandbox was an opportunity for the community to test and evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of encapsulated InfiniBand products such as Obsidian’s Longbow E100 devices. Clearly encrypted data movement between HPC clusters is a critical need for the community. The team tested and evaluated multiple file movement technologies. The technology enables high performance network connectivity across wide-area networks. However, robust testing was required to characterize and verify the performance of interconnects for secure and unsecure data transmissions.

The architecture involved technologies from multiple vendors and was embedded in the DICE test bed, a geographically distributed test environment, to evaluate and verify the performance and effectiveness of applications and file systems utilizing InfiniBand over the WAN. The DICE research team was actively investigating both transfer applications and I/O access for a variety of different patterns using this InfiniBand extended model. The file systems chosen for this project included Lustre, IBM’s General Parallel File System, Network File System via network-attached storage, as well as pNFS from server-based and NAS-based shares.

Each site was connected to the SC10 location by a 10GbE connection and utilized Obsidian ES InfiniBand extenders to encapsulate InfiniBand traffic over the links. A diagram of the architecture and the list of contributors are below.

DICE - SCinet Sandbox Architecture

Click the image above for a larger view of the diagram.

Vendors

AMP NetConnect, Aspera, Brocade, DataDirect Networks, Exar, Force10, Fusion-io, IBM, Intel/SuperMicro, Mellanox, Microsoft, Obsidian Strategics, SGI and Tyco Electronics

Research Teams

Avetec / DICE, Computer Sciences Corporation, ESnet, Lawrence Livermore National Lab (LLNL), NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (NASA GFSC), National Lambda Rail (NLR) and The Ohio State University

This project also included the involvement of several SCinet technical personnel. The following SCinet teams participated in this project for architecture support, test preparation, test execution and monitoring: SCinet Measurement, SCinet WAN, SCinet Fiber, SCinet Routing and SCinetOpenFabrics.

Sandbox in the News

DICE-SCinet Research Sandbox Investigation of Effective Encrypted Data Movement at Supercomputing Conference
December 3, 2010
At the Supercomputing 2010 (SC10) conference that took place November 16-18, 2010, Avetec’s DICE program, through partnership with government, academic and HPC vendors, demonstrated the effectiveness and efficiency of applications and file systems using Obsidian Strategics’ Longbow™ InfiniBand range-extension.

SCinet Research Sandbox to Demonstrate Unprecedented HPC Industry Collaboration
November 2, 2010
At the Supercomputing 2010 (SC10) conference, Avetec’s DICE program will demonstrate through collaboration with government, academic and HPC vendors the performance and effectiveness of applications and file systems utilizing InfiniBand over the, real-world wide-area networks (WAN).

Near Perfect Use of a 10GE WAN with Longbow Encryption Fully Enabled
October 27, 2010
Dr. DK Panda, professor of computer science with The Ohio State University's Department of Computer Sciences, has released preliminary study results that show significant advancement in researchers' ability to send high performance computing data with Obsidian's Longbow(tm) InfiniBand range-extension, routing and encryption products.

Team Will Demonstrate Encrypted Data Movement Between HPC Clusters at SC‘10
October 5, 2010
Avetec's Data Intensive Computing Environment (DICE), along with its partner, Obsidian Strategics, the makers of the Longbow™ InfiniBand range-extension, routing and encryption products, will conduct a Sandbox (System Area Network Demonstration) of encrypted data movement between high performance computing clusters during the November Supercomputing 2010 Conference (SC10) in New Orleans.

Sneak Peek into The SCinet Sandbox
October 4, 2010
Avetec is taking part in the DICE program’s Sandbox project at SC10 in New Orleans this year along with several national labs and companies who want to demonstrate the potential of using geographically distributed Infiniband clusters in a common Infiniband mesh so clusters can interoperate to share messages and send data back and forth.

DICE Partners with Obsidian Strategics for Secure Large-Scale Data Migration Study
July 22, 2010
Avetec’s Data Intensive Computing Environment (DICE) Program has partnered with Obsidian Strategics, Inc., maker of Longbow™ InfiniBand range-extension, routing and encryption products, 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.'

DICE PARTNERS

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