December 21, 2006
[ return to the news list ]
From the National LambdaRail mailing list http://mailman.nlr.net/mailman/listinfo/news
An international team of physicists, computer scientists, and network engineers 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) 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 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 LambdaRail
(www.nlr.net) 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 nine Gbps to Caltech from Tampa, and eight pairs of servers sending seven Gbps of data in the reverse direction.
One of the key advances in this demonstration was Fast Data Transport (FDT; http://monalisa.cern.ch/FDT), a Java application developed by Iosif Legrand of Caltech that runs on all major platforms and uses the NIO libraries to achieve stable disk reads and writes coordinated with smooth data flow across the long-range network. FDT streams a large set of files across an open TCP socket, so that a large data set composed of thousands of files, as is typical in high-energy physics applications, can be sent or received at full speed, without the network transfer restarting between files. By combining FDT with FAST TCP, developed by Steven Low of Caltech's computer science department, together with an optimized Linux kernel provided by Shawn McKee of Michigan known as the "UltraLight kernel," the team reached unprecedented throughput levels, limited only by the speeds of the disks, that correspond to nine GBytes/sec reading from, or five Gbytes/sec writing to, a single rack of 40 low-cost servers.
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, 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....
For the complete article, see http://www.physorg.com/news85246030.html
Posted by rab5 at 05:17 PM
[ return to the news list ]
