NASA Demonstrates New High-Speed Encrypted Network

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NASA Successfully Demonstrates Remote High-speed Encrypted InfiniBand Applications Over National LambdaRail

Portland, Ore. – (Virtual Press Office) - NASA network engineers successfully extended the secure computing environment of the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) facility at NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif. to the showroom floor of Supercomputing 2009 (SC09) at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland, Ore.

The demonstration utilized a high-speed network provided by the NASA Research and Engineering Network (NREN) and National LambdaRail that was recently upgraded with Cisco Systems, Inc. equipment to create a 40-gigabit-per-second (Gbps) connection. This 40 Gbps infrastructure was thoroughly tested with bi-directional 4x10 Gigabit Ethernet (GigE) data streams generated with nuttcp, a NASA-developed application for network performance testing and file transfers.

There was zero packet loss between the host systems at Ames and Portland for notable periods during these tests—a critical condition for file transfers at 10 Gbps or higher. Using nuttscp and RAID50 disk arrays on systems costing only about $5K each, engineers were able to achieve 9 Gbps of disk-to-disk transfers between Ames and Portland.

In another demonstration on this 40 Gbps network testbed, using Longbow E100 networking devices developed by Obsidian Research, engineers seamlessly and securely extended NAS’ InfiniBand (IB) network connection nearly 600 miles to drive remote simulations without loss of data fidelity. The proof-of-concept was demonstrated with NASA’s finite-volume General Circulation Model (fvGCM) application on a small traveling version of the hyperwall visualization system. In addition, using the D-sync application (an IB version of R-sync), systems from SC09 were able to generate encrypted file transfers at almost 750 MB/s (6 Gbps).

NASA scientists and engineers can leverage this capability for solving problems such as global climate change and other compute-intensive engineering problems. This cost-effective network extension technology may also minimize the need to retrofit or expand existing data centers.

Ongoing demonstrations of NASA’s network capability are available on the SC09 showroom floor (booth # 1947) throughout the conference.

For more information about NASA’s presence at the SC09 conference, visit: www.nas.nasa.gov/SC09