Obsidian Strategics Inc. is a private Canadian corporation with two wholly owned subsidiaries: Obsidian Research Corporation located in the Advanced Technology Center at the Edmonton Research Park in Edmonton Alberta with responsibility for product design, production and technical support; and US-based Obsidian Strategics Ltd. managing sales, marketing and fulfillment activities from offices in Reston, Virginia. Obsidian was formed to commercialize High Performance Computing (HPC) products for data transport, storage and processing based on the company’s proprietary intellectual property.
The Longbow™ technology was developed under the guidance of the United States military for a pan-agency, Pentagon-funded Joint Capabilities Technology Demonstration Project - Large Data (www.largedata.net). The Longbow family of products are network devices that extend InfiniBand fabrics across existing 10Gb optical networks allowing remote fabrics to communicate at full bandwidth. Except for flight-time induced latency, the connection is transparent to the InfiniBand hardware, stacks, operating systems, and applications. Other features include routing and encryption.
Obsidian’s products are enterprise-class, commercial off the shelf (COTS) devices supporting the InfiniBand protocol used in Supercomputer and HPC environments. Early-adopters of Longbow technology include the US military and intelligence agencies, NASA and the Department of Energy. As data volumes continue to explode, enterprise and academic sectors are migrating to Longbow-enabled InfiniBand infrastructures to meet throughput and transactional performance targets across campus, metro and global networks.
