New Record for Network Data Transfer

An international team of Physicists, computer scientists, and network engineers joined forces to set new records for sustained data transfer between storage systems during the SuperComputing 2006 (SC06) Bandwidth Challenge (BWC).

The high-energy physics (HEP) team is led by the California Institute of Technology, CERN, and the University of Michigan and partners at the University of Florida and Vanderbilt, as well as participants from Brazil (Rio de Janeiro State University, UERJ, and the State Universities of São Paulo, USP and UNESP) and Korea (Kyungpook National University, KISTI). The HEP 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 ( www.nlr.net ) that carried data in both directions.

Overall, this year's demonstration, following the team's record memory-to-memory transfer rate of 151 Gbps using 22 10-Gbps links last year at SuperComputing 2005 (read our past posting), represents a major milestone in providing practical, widely deployable applications. These applications exploit advances in state-of-the-art TCP-based data transport, servers (Intel Woodcrest-based systems) and the Linux kernel over the last 12 months. FDT also represents a clear advance in basic data transport capability over wide-area networks compared to last year, in that 20 Gbps could be sustained in a few streams memory-to-memory over long distances very stably for many hours, using a single 10-Gigabit Ethernet link very close to full capacity in both directions.

Further information about the demonstration may be found at:
http://monalisa.caltech.edu
http://monalisa.cern.ch/FDT
http://supercomputing.caltech.edu/
http://pcbunn.cacr.caltech.edu/sc2006/
https://scinet.supercomp.org/2006/bwc/