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Obsidian, the leader in InfiniBand range extension, will deploy more than 20 Longbows including – the first InfiniBand devices with routing capability – within SCinet's OpenFabric network to pass full line-rate InfiniBand traffic between three separate subnets arranged in a chain. Each subnet corresponds to a region of the show floor at the Reno Convention Center. This experimental network demonstration (Xnet) uses an unmodified OFED stack and subnet manager (Open Fabrics Enterprise Distribution – the open-source support for InfiniBand running under Linux or Windows). Obsidian pioneered the InfiniBand router to support the deployment of long-haul InfiniBand. Routing was built into the Longbow XR, which was designed for global-reach InfiniBand over OC-192 or 10GbEthernet Wide Area Networks (WANs). “Routing mode helps network scalability,” explained Dr. David Southwell, President and CEO of Obsidian Research, “since isolating each site's subnet avoids administration, performance and failover problems as more locations are added. Routing can also benefit single-site InfiniBand installations (especially very large ones) by reducing the computational load on each subnet manager host server, and by providing fault isolation between subnets of a fabric.” Subscribers to SCinet routed InfiniBand booth connections exchange storage traffic between the three InfiniBand subnets. Ames Laboratory (booth #181) and OpenFabrics (booth #2660) - and others - are participating in this Xnet demonstration. The range-extending routers pass the full 4X SDR InfiniBand bandwidth, and incur negligible additional latency – about 1.7 microseconds – to each routed link. Subscribers to non-routed SCinet InfiniBand booth connections operate within their local subnet, oblivious to the presence of the four Longbow routers or neighbouring subnets. Troy Benjegerdes of Ames Laboratory - and SCinet OpenFabrics lead for 2007 - said of the technology, “We are happy to work with Obsidian's Longbows to showcase InfiniBand routing at Reno. Deploying a show-floor wide InfiniBand network at the Reno convention center would not have been possible without the Longbow range extender technology. Routing capability will provide us with fault isolation and make the whole network more robust. It is clear that routing will play an increasingly important role as InfiniBand continues to penetrate High Performance Computing (HPC). The Longbow XR has proven itself to be a fast and robust router solution.”