Around The World At 1 Gigabyte A Second
Thu 16 Feb 2006
GridPP members from RAL, taking part in the latest LCH service challenge, have helped move data around the world at a Gigabyte a second. The success was announced yesterday by the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid collaboration at this years' international CHEP conference in Mumbai.
Easily surpassing last years' peak of 600 Megabytes a second, it was achieved during Service Challenge 3, the largest test yet of the LCG infrastructure. The number of Tier-1 centres used was also increased, from 7 based in Europe and the US last year, to 12 from all over the world this year.
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| Histogram monitor by the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, Mumbai, demonstrating data transfer rates up to 1 gigabyte per second from CERN to the major computing centres during the tests. |
With the maximum sustained data rates of one Gigabyte a second you could transfer a DVD worth of data every five seconds. Professor Tony Doyle, the GridPP project leader, commented, "At these rates, it would take 25 days to transfer the 400,000 films listed at IMDB.com and only an hour and a half to transfer the 1000 films produced each year by the Mumbai-based Bollywood. It might take a bit longer to watch them all."
Jos Engelen, the Chief Scientific Officer of CERN, said "For the first time, several sites in Asia were also involved in this service challenge, making it truly global in scope. Another first was that real physics data was shipped, stored and processed under conditions similar to those expected when scientists start recording results from the LHC."
The UK Tier-1 at RAL took part in the test, receiving data from CERN at close to 200 megabytes per second. Service challenge 3 also involved the Universities of Edinburgh, Lancaster and Imperial College London in successful tests of real-time storage, distribution and analysis of this data.
Dr Andrew Sansum, the manager of the particle physics computing centre at RAL, was pleased with the results of the tests. "We went well beyond our target data rate. With the installation of SuperJanet5, later this year, we plan to double these data rates and then well really be approaching the speeds we need when the LHC comes on line in 2007."
The next step for GridPP is to schedule similar tests between RAL and the UK universities, who are grouped into four regional Tier-2s. When the LHC is running a fraction of the data sent to RAL will be duplicated to the Tier-2s. During the next few months GridPP will be testing that these transfers work at the required rates, and then that these rates can be maintained simultaneously with data flowing into RAL from CERN.
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| Data transfer rates to RAL in the UK, showing data rates during the service challenge of almost 200 megabytes per second. |
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