Researchers Claim New Data Transfer Speed Record

By Greg McNevin

December 15, 2008: An international team of physicists led by the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have claimed a new data transfer record, reaching 110 Gbit/s sustained rates among storage systems over wider area networks, and 200 Gbit/s metro data rates on next-generation fibre optic links.

Building on seven years of record-breaking developments, the team – which includes computer scientists and network engineers from Fermilab, Brookhaven, CERN and a range of countries - set the new records for sustained data transfer rates during the Supercomputing 2008 (SC08) conference recently held in Austin, Texas.

Caltech's exhibit at SC08 by the High Energy Physics (HEP) group and the Center for Advanced Computing Research (CACR) demonstrated a number of new applications and systems for globally-distributed data analysis for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, along with Caltech's 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.

However the highlight of the exhibit was the HEP team's 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, São Paulo), Korea (Daegu), Estonia, and locations in the US LHCNet network in Chicago, New York, Geneva, and Amsterdam.

The record smashes its predecessor, achieved at SC07, by 30 Gbps, and was possible due to the team’s use of a small fraction of the global LHC grid.

The team sustained rates of more than 40 Gbps in both directions for many hours (and up to 71 Gbps in one direction), demonstrating that a well-designed and configured single rack of servers is now capable of saturating the highest-speed wide-area network links in production use today, which have a capacity of 40 Gbps in each direction.

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