NASA has turned to a start-up specializing in packet inspection to monitor some of its 10G bit/sec WAN links.

Mountain View, Calif.-based cPacket makes chips that router and switch manufacturers can build into their gear to provide wire-speed network traffic analysis. In addition, cPacket offers an appliance version of its technology. Its cTap network appliance can tap into network links and listen in, providing network behavior and traffic details along with troubleshooting and analysis capabilities. It also features packet filtering, mirroring, forwarding, and time-stamps through dedicated 10G and 1G Ethernet ports, cPacket says.

The company touts the fact that its packet-inspection technology examines every bit in every packet of high-speed network traffic – both header and data payload – and then selectively monitors and controls the traffic based upon those inspections.

At NASA’s Ames Research Center, the Emergent Network Technology Testbed group is using cTap appliances to provide network traffic visibility and behavioral monitoring; troubleshooting and debugging; monitoring of packet loss and compliance to service level agreements; and a centralized view of performance, capacity and availability across multiple 10 Gigabit links.

The cTap appliances support the agency’s High End Computing Capability (HECC) project, which includes Pleiades, the world’s fourth fastest supercomputer. NASA’s Pleiades supercomputer has 51,200 processor-cores and is capable of 609 trillion floating point calculations per second. NASA uses it for projects such as ocean and atmosphere climate change modeling, space vehicle simulations and models of dark matter, for example.

“Because of our tradition of delivering mission-critical applications that push all technical boundaries, we often rely heavily on network monitoring tools such as cTaps,” said Dave Hartzell, CSC network engineer and member of the Emergent Network Technology Testbed group, in a statement. “cPacket’s technology enables more effective network monitoring and analysis of our 10 gigabit WAN and LAN; we have greater visibility into our network links, providing us with in-depth, real-time information regarding traffic and performance metrics.”

Ann Bednarz is associate news editor at Network World.