•
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
•
Click here for a full-sized version of the thumbnail above. Image shows a MonALISA plot of the aggregated network traffic to the Caltech booth, during and after the Bandwidth Challenge. (The initial blue region at the left of the graph is the BWC entry.)
An international team of physicists, computer scientists, and network engineers led by the California Institute of Technology, CERN, and the University of Michigan with partners at the University of Florida and Vanderbilt, as well as participants from Brazil and Korea, joined forces to set new records for sustained data transfer between storage systems during the SC06 Bandwidth Challenge.
The high-energy physics team’s demonstration of “High Speed Data Gathering, Distribution and Analysis for Physics Discoveries at the Large Hadron Collider” achieved a peak throughput of 17.77 gigabits per second (Gbps) between clusters of servers at the show floor and at Caltech. Following the rules set for the SC06 Bandwidth Challenge, the team used a single 10-Gbps link provided by National Lambda Rail that carried data in both directions. Sustained throughput throughout the night prior to the bandwidth challenge exceeded 16 Gbps (or two gigabytes per second) using just 10 pairs of small servers sending data at 9 Gbps to Caltech from Tampa, and eight pairs of servers sending 7 Gbps of data in the reverse direction. (Read more in the Caltech Press Release)
•
Caltech, SLAC, Fermilab, CERN, Florida and Partners in the UK, Brazil and Korea Set 101 Gigabit Per Second Mark During the SuperComputing 2004 Bandwidth Challenge.
PITTSBURGH, Pa. — For the second consecutive year, the High Energy Physics team of physicists, computer scientists and network engineers led by the California Institute of Technology and their partners at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), Fermilab, CERN and the University of Florida, as well as international participants from the UK (University of Manchester, UCL and UKLight), Brazil (Rio de Janeiro State University, UERJ, and the State Universities of Sao Paulo, USP and UNESP) and Korea (Kyungpook National University, KISTI) joined forces at the Supercomputing 2004 (SC04) Bandwidth Challenge to capture the Sustained Bandwidth Award. Their demonstration of High Speed TeraByte Transfers for Physics achieved a throughput of 101 gigabits per second (Gbps) to and from the show floor, which exceeds the previous year’s mark of 23.2 Gbps, set by the same team, by a factor of more than four. The record data transfer speed is equivalent to downloading three full DVD movies per second, or transmitting all of the content of the Library of Congress in 15 minutes. It also has been estimated to be approximately 5% of the total rate of production of new content on Earth during the test. Read more »