Facilitating NASA's high-bandwidth computing applications is critical to NREN's charter. Supercomputing applications requiring low-latency (< 5 microsecond) messaging or high-throughput (> 1 gigabit per second) transfers between processing nodes can be accomplished with InfiniBand (IB) technology. IB is gaining broad acceptance for supercomputing applications as a clustering and storage interconnect. It supports speeds of 10 gigabit per second and beyond, combining clustering, storage and wide-area linkage into a single network, which can provide significant cost savings for Project Columbia.

A key feature of InfiniBand permits remote direct memory access (RDMA) between processing nodes, allowing direct access to other nodes' hardware, such as memory and disk systems. This allows developers and application owners to bypass the TCP/IP stack, accelerating development and the application performance. NREN is investigating methods for extending IB beyond the local-area environment, which is currently limited at 300-meters. The first phase of this investigation included a 40-kilometer fiber-optic span between two Columbia nodes. Subsequent investigation phases will extend InfiniBand to regional or cross-country distances, enabling high-fidelity visualization or bulk data transfers.