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Visit us at Booth 2135!
At the 2009 Supercomputing (SC) Conference being held in Portland, Oregon November 14-20, CACR will be highlighting our research in computational biology, computing and networking for high-energy physics, data analysis for neutron scattering experiments, hypervelocity impact simulations, and time-domain astronomy. The SC Conference is the premier international conference for high performance computing (HPC), networking, storage and analysis.
Among the demonstrations at the CACR exhibit will be the Caltech entry in SC’s Bandwidth Challenge. The Bandwidth Challenge is an annual competition for leading-edge network applications developed by teams of researchers from around the globe. The Caltech entry for this year’s challenge is entitled Moving towards Terabit/sec Scientific Dataset Transfers: the LHC Challenge. This entry will demonstrate Storage to Storage physics dataset transfers of up to 100 Gbps sustained in one direction, and well above 100 Gbps in total bidirectionally, using a total of fifteen 10Gbps drops at the Caltech Booth.
Caltech’s PSAAP center will be represented in the NNSA exhibit as one of five centers of excellence focusing on predictive science. A talk entitled, “UQ Pipeline Ballistic Impact Simulations – Methods and Experiences”, will be given by Sharon Brunett in the NNSA exhibit (Booth 735) on Tuesday, November 17 at 5:15PM.
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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
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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)
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For the third consecutive year at the Supercomputing Conference series, an international team of scientists and engineers, including key staff from CACR, has smashed the network speed record, moving data at an average rate of 100 gigabits per second (Gbps) for several hours at a time. A rate of 100 Gbps is sufficient for transmitting five feature-length DVD movies on the Internet from one location to another in a single second.
The SC conference series brings together scientists, engineers, researchers, educators, senior managers, programmers, and system managers from the world’s leading computing installations and companies to showcase innovative developments that are sparking new ideas and new industries, as well as reinvigorating older ones. The SC05 theme, “Gateway to Discovery,” was inspired both by the beautiful and exciting city of Seattle, Washington and by the ever-expanding efforts of the High Performance Computing community to expand our knowledge through the use of HPC as gateways to new and useful discoveries.
Caltech was represented not only in the successful Bandwidth Challenge entry, but also in the conference exhibit hall once again – our 16th year. This year’s exhibit highlighted the following research areas:
- Caltech’s DOE ASC Center for Simulating the Dynamic Response of Materials
- Grids for Physics/HPC Bandwidth Challenge
- Geophysics: Enabling Science to Better Understand our Planet
- Virtual Astronomy: Facilitating Scientific Discovery (including the National Virtual Observatory and the Palomar-Quest Sky Survey )
Press
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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 »
