InfiniCortex: present and future invited paper

Commencing in June 2014, A*STAR Computational Resource Centre (A*CRC) team in Singapore, together with dozens of partners world-wide, have been building the InfiniCortex. Four concepts are integrated together to realise InfiniCortex: i) High bandwidth (~ 10 to 100Gbps) intercontinental connectivity between four continents: Asia, North America, Australia and Europe; ii) InfiniBand extension technology supporting transcontinental distances using Obsidian's Longbow range extenders; iii) Connecting separate InfiniBand sub-nets with different net topologies to create a single computational resource: Galaxy of Supercomputers [10] iv) Running workflows and applications on such a distributed computational infrastructure. We have successfully demonstrated InfiniCortex prototypes at SC14 and SC15 conferences. The infrastructure comprised of computing resources residing at multiple locations in Singapore, Japan, Australia, USA, Canada, France and Poland. Various concurrent applications, including workflows, I/O heavy applications enabled with ADIOS system, Extempore real-time interactive applications, and in-situ realtime visualisations were demonstrated. In this paper we briefly report on basic ideas behind Infini-Cortex construct, our recent successes and some ideas about further growth and extension of this project.