INTERCONNECTS

The deployment of next generation high performance security is critical to realizing the full potential of grid networks to enhance collaborative research, modeling and complex analysis, said Steve Garrison, Force10 Networks, vice president of corporate marketing. Speaking at the Cluster 2006 conference in Barcelona, Garrison said that as with other high speed networks, grid security must not come at the cost of compromised performance. “Grid networks have fundamentally altered the approach to solving complex problems, enabling organizations to rapidly process terabytes of data and model everything from weather phenomena to airplane design,” continued Garrison. “Like any network, however, grids are vulnerable to security breaches and must be secured at the speed with which they operate to realize their full computing benefits.” Grid networks are comprised of many computing clusters located in geographically disparate locations that are typically connected via 10 Gigabit Ethernet WAN links. By combining the compute power of the individual clusters, grid networks deliver an extremely powerful tool across which data can be shared, analyzed and modeled in parallel. However, as traffic moves from a singular computing cluster onto the grid network, it becomes vulnerable to security breaches. “Security has tended to lag behind networking technologies, creating a gap between the speed of the network and the speed at which the network can be secured,” said Garrison. “To protect the high performance grid and ensure future adoption of the technology, IT managers require security that inspects and blocks malicious traffic at line-rate 10 Gigabits per second while protecting sensitive data, findings and analysis.” Earlier this year, Force10 introduced the industry’s first security appliance that can secure high performance networks at line-rate 10 Gigabits per second. The Force10 P-Series relies upon programmable hardware to deliver processing power with the flexibility of software, enabling IT managers to add, delete and update rules in real time. Leveraging a unique parallel processing architecture, the Force10 P-Series can process thousands of these rules simultaneously. The Force10 TeraScale E-Series is deployed in some of the world’s largest grid networks. TeraGrid, a national grid based in the U.S. with more than 102 teraflops of computing capability and more than 15 petabytes of online and archival data storage, leverages the TeraScale E-Series in nearly every one of its sites, including the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, the San Diego Supercomputing Center and the Texas Advanced Computing Center. The TeraScale E-Series also anchors the Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information (KISTI), Korea’s national supercomputer center and part of the international grid network GLORIAD, which connects the country with scientists and researchers worldwide.