Infinicortex: Another Path to Reach Exascale Supercomputing

The InfiniCortex uses a metaphor of a human brain’s outer layer, the Cortex, to deliver concurrent supercomputing across the globe utilizing transcontinental InfiniBand and Galaxy of Supercomputers. We have integrated four separately important and interesting concepts to realize InfiniCortex: 

i) High bandwidth intercontinental connectivity between Asia (Singapore, Japan), Australia, the USA and Europe (Poland, France); 

ii) InfiniBand transport over trans-continental distances using Obsidian Strategics range extenders; 

iii) Connecting separate InfiniBand sub-nets with different net topologies to create a single computational resource: Galaxy of Supercomputers; 

iv) Workflows and applications on such a concurrent, distributed computational infrastructure, especially using ADIOS I/O framework. 

This year, at SC15 in Austin, TX, we will demonstrate the most extensive InfiniCortex demonstration to date – comprising the world’s first circumnavigation by InfiniBand, with most of the path operating at 100Gbps speeds. Applications are being tested from many sites and will include genomics services, bio-informatics, medical image analysis, plasma reactor simulation, asynchronous linear solvers, ADIOS framework, distributed HPC storage, resources virtualization (GPU, virtual machines, etc.). It is planned to screen live network traffic data from all the trunks and connections, and live network benchmark data as well as visual displays of applications from all partners.