High Energy Physics Team Sets New Data-Transfer World Records
Building on seven years of record-breaking developments, an international team of physicists, computer scientists, and network engineers led by the California Institute of Technology (Caltech)–with partners from Michigan, Florida, Tennessee, Fermilab, Brookhaven, CERN, Brazil, Pakistan, Korea, and Estonia–set new records for sustained data transfer among storage systems during the SuperComputing 2008 (SC08) conference recently held in Austin, Texas.
Caltech’s exhibit at SC08 by the CACR and the High Energy Physics (HEP) group demonstrated new applications and systems for globally distributed data analysis for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, along with Caltech global monitoring system MonALISA and its collaboration system EVO (Enabling Virtual Organizations), together with near real-time simulations of earthquakes in the Southern California region, experiences in time-domain astronomy with VOEventNet and Google Sky, and recent results in multiphysics multiscale modeling with the PSAAP project.
A highlight of the exhibit was the HEP team record-breaking demonstration of storage-to-storage data transfers over wide area networks from a single rack of servers on the exhibit floor. The team’s demonstration of “High Speed LHC Data Gathering, Distribution and Analysis Using Next Generation Networks” achieved a bidirectional peak throughput of 114 gigabits per second (Gbps) and a sustained data flow of more than 110 Gbps among clusters of servers on the show floor and at Caltech, Michigan, CERN (Geneva), Fermilab (Batavia), Brazil (Rio de Janiero, Sao Paulo), Korea (Daegu), Estonia, and locations in the US LHCNet network in Chicago, New York, Geneva, and Amsterdam.
The image shows a sample of the results obtained at the Caltech booth, monitored by MonALISA, flowing in and out of the servers at the booth. The feature in the middle of the graph is the result of briefly losing the local session at SC08 driving some of the flows.
Read more in the Caltech Press Release