Researchers have
set a new world record for data transfer, helping to usher in the next
generation of high-speed network technology. At the SuperComputing 2011 (SC11)
conference in Seattle
during mid-November, the international team transferred data in opposite
directions at a combined rate of 186 Gbps in a wide-area network circuit. The
rate is equivalent to moving two million gigabytes per day, fast enough to
transfer nearly 100,000 full Blu-ray disks—each with a complete movie and all
the extras—in a day.
The team of
high-energy physicists, computer scientists, and network engineers was led by
the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), the University of Victoria,
the University of Michigan, the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN),
Florida International University, and other partners.
According to the
researchers, the achievement will help establish new ways to transport the
increasingly large quantities of data that traverse continents and oceans via
global networks of optical fibers. These new methods are needed for the next
generation of network technology—which allows transfer rates of 40 and 100
Gbps—that will be built in the next couple of years.
“Our group
and its partners are showing how massive amounts of data will be handled and
transported in the future,” says Harvey Newman, professor of physics and
head of the high-energy physics (HEP) team. “Having these tools in our
hands allows us to engage in realizable visions others do not have. We can see
a clear path to a future others cannot yet imagine with any confidence.”
Using a 100-Gbps
circuit set up by Canada’s
Advanced Research and Innovation Network (CANARIE) and BCNET, a non-profit,
shared IT services organization, the team was able to reach transfer rates of
98 Gbps between the University of Victoria Computing Centre located in Victoria,
British Columbia, and the Washington State
Convention Center in Seattle. With a simultaneous data rate of 88
Gbps in the opposite direction, the team reached a sustained two-way data rate
of 186 Gbps between two data centers, breaking the team’s previous peak-rate
record of 119 Gbps set in 2009.
In addition,
partners from the University of Florida, the University of California at San
Diego, Vanderbilt University, Brazil (Rio de Janeiro State University and the
São Paulo State University), and Korea (Kyungpook National University and the
Korean Institute for Science and Technology Information) helped with a larger
demonstration, transferring massive amounts of data between the Caltech booth
at the SC11 conference and other locations within the United States, as well as
in Brazil and Korea.
The fast transfer
rate is also crucial for dealing with the tremendous amounts of data coming
from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, the particle accelerator that
physicists hope will help them discover new particles and better understand the
nature of matter, and space and time, solving some of the biggest mysteries of
the universe. More than 100 PB of data have been processed, distributed, and
analyzed using a global grid of 300 computing and storage facilities located at
laboratories and universities around the world, and the data volume is expected
to rise a thousand-fold as physicists crank up the collision rates and energies
at the LHC.
“Enabling
scientists anywhere in the world to work on the LHC data is a key objective,
bringing the best minds together to work on the mysteries of the
universe,” says David Foster, the deputy IT department head at CERN.
“The
100-Gbps demonstration at SC11 is pushing the limits of network technology by
showing that it is possible to transfer petascale particle physics data in a
matter of hours to anywhere around the world,” adds Randall Sobie, a
research scientist at the Institute of Particle Physics in Canada and team
member.
The key to
discovery, the researchers say, is in picking out the rare signals that may
indicate new physics discoveries from a sea of potentially overwhelming
background noise caused by already understood particle interactions. To do
this, individual physicists and small groups located around the world must
repeatedly access—and sometimes extract and transport—multiterabyte data sets
on demand from petabyte data stores. That’s equivalent to grabbing hundreds of
Blu-ray movies all at once from a pool of hundreds of thousands. The HEP team
hopes that the demonstrations at SC11 will pave the way towards more effective
distribution and use for discoveries of the masses of LHC data.
“By sharing
our methods and tools with scientists in many fields, we hope that the research
community will be well positioned to further enable their discoveries, taking
full advantage of 100 Gbps networks as they become available,” Newman
says. “In particular, we hope that these developments will afford
physicists and young students the opportunity to participate directly in the
LHC’s next round of discoveries as they emerge.”