Bach Seat

Researchers have set a new world record for data transfer. The new record was set at the SuperComputing 2011 (SC11) conference in Seattle, Washington. PhysOrg.com reports the international team set the speed record when they transferred 186 gigabits per second (Gbps) of data across 134 miles of an optical network for 11 hours.

Commercially available circuits

The record-setting connection used a commercially available 100 Gbps circuit. The circuit was set up by Canada’s Advanced Research and Innovation Network (CANARIE) and BCNET, a non-profit, shared IT services organization. PhysOrg says the team was able to reach transfer rates of 98 Gbps between the University of Victoria Computing Center in Victoria, BC, 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. This broke the team’s previous peak-rate record of 119 Gbps set in 2009.

California Institute of Technology (Caltech) led the team of high-energy physicists, computer scientists, and network engineers from the University of Victoria, the University of Michigan, the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN), and other partners.

According to PhysOrg, the achievement will help set up new ways to transport increasingly large quantities of data. More and more data traverse continents and oceans via global networks of optical fibers. The next generation of network technology needs new methods to 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,” Harvey Newman, professor of physics and head of the high-energy physics (HEP) team told PhysOrg. “Having these tools in our hands allows us to engage in realizable visions others do not have.”

“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 told PhysOrg.

The speed record equipment was not sexy

ExtremeTech points out that the achievement is quite significant. It is significant because the scientists used a commercially available 100 Gbps link and not “over private networks under laboratory/testbed conditions.” The equipment was not particularly sexy either. ExtremeTech lists Dell (DELL) servers with Intel (INTC) Sandy Bridge-based server motherboards with PCIe 2.0 and 3.0 solid-state drives. They used 10 and 40 Gbps LAN connections, and Force10 Z9000 and Brocade (BRCD) MLXe-4 switch-routers. The gear was able to achieve a disk to disk transfer rate of 60 Gbps, around 7.5 gigabytes per second. The 186 Gbps record was a memory-to-memory transfer between the servers. The max per-computer speed was 35 Gbps. Tested.com calculates that 4.42 petabytes traveled across the network during the transfer test.

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So why does anyone need to move two million gigabytes per day? This is fast enough to transfer nearly 100,000 full Blu-ray disks—each with a complete movie and all the extras—in a day.

CERN needs faster transfer rates. CERN needs to move the huge amounts of data coming from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The LHC has already generated more than 100 petabytes of data. The data is processed, distributed, and analyzed at 300 computing and storage facilities at laboratories and universities around the world. Scientists believe the data volume will rise a thousand-fold as physicists crank up the collision rates and energies at the LHC in their attempt to cause the end of the world (Not)

FierceTelecom predicts that service providers will deploy 100Gig when the price of 100Gig is double the price of 40Gig. They believe that will take place in 2013.

This massive amount of bandwidth running on commodity Internet pipes with available hardware seems to spit in the eye of current bandwidth providers who can’t seem to provide a 10 Mbps circuit reliably.

Related articles

• Standard optical fiber transmits 1.7Tbps over core network (arstechnica.com)
• Huawei Claims to Have Developed Beyond LTE Network with 30 Gbps Speed (devicemag.com)

Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.