infiniband is the interconnect inside a supercomputer: short range, one subnet, the fabric a machine uses to talk to itself. infinicortex was a*star's attempt to stretch it across oceans, using range extenders over optical fibre and routing separate subnets into one another, so that machines in singapore, australia, europe and north america could be driven as a single system. what circled the planet was a supercomputer's own internal network rather than a network between supercomputers.

marek michalewicz, who ran a*star's computational resource centre, gave the talk on it at iacs on 27 august 2015. stony brook became one of the sites on the fabric.

that meant dealing with obsidian directly to get the longbow and crossbow units to us on loan. i took delivery myself and carried the package over to the iacs supercomputing center to be installed.

in november 2016 i went to sc16 in salt lake city on an iacs travel award, for the unveiling of stony brook's addition to the network. the fabric ran as four subnets that year and stony brook was one of them, with five longbow units tying the show floor back to a*crc in singapore at fifty gigabits.

infinicortex, from proof-of-concept to production · iacs