Three-hour snapshot of total bandwidth usage, showing an average throughput of more than 100 Gbps. The official measurement took place shortly after 04:00 GMT. |
A team of physicists, computer scientists and network engineers recently shattered the world network speed record, transferring physics data at a rate of over 150 gigabits per second to capture first prize in the SC|05 Bandwidth Challenge. At that rate, all of the printed content of the Library of Congress could be transmitted in only 10 minutes.
SC|05, the Supercomputing 2005 conference, hosted the contest that challenged scientists and networking engineers to create the best and most advanced techniques for using vast amounts of data and showcasing it on advanced networks.
The team, led by the California Institute of Technology, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center and the University of Michigan, won the Challenge on November 16 with an official measured throughput of 131.6 Gbps on 17 of the 22 optical fiber links used in the entry. In preparation for its third consecutive win, 475 terabytes of high energy physics data was transferred in 24 hours, with average data rates of more than 100 Gbps sustained for several hours.
"This demonstration allowed us to preview the globally distributed grid system of more than 100 laboratory- and university-based computing facilities that is now being developed in the U.S., Europe, Asia and Latin America in preparation for the next generation of high energy physics experiments at the Large Hadron Collider," said Caltech's Harvey Newman, head of the Bandwidth Challenge team.
The Bandwidth Challenge entry was part of the preparation for the torrent of data that will come from the experiments at the LHC, which will become the world's highest energy particle accelerator when it begins operating in 2007 at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. The processing, distribution and analysis of the data by thousands of physicists worldwide will be completed using high-speed optical networks, software to monitor and manage the data flows across the networks, and grid computing.
Such high rates of data transfer are not just for future experiments—today's scientists are benefiting as well. The team's entry used applications that transfer actual physics data from currently running physics experiments. Data sources included production storage systems and file servers now helping to drive studies of high energy physics and astrophysics.
The winning Bandwidth Challenge team also included researchers from Brookhaven National Laboratory; CERN; the KEK Laboratory; the Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information; Kyungpook National University; Rio de Janeiro State University; São Paulo State University; University of Florida; University of Manchester; and Vanderbilt University. The Bandwidth Challenge was sponsored by Qwest.
For more information about the high energy physics team's Bandwidth Challenge entry, including a list of all participating network and equipment providers, please visit the Caltech and SLAC SC|05 Web pages, or read the Caltech press release.
—Katie Yurkewicz
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