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Fastest Gun
By Raven Hanna
SLAC partnered with Caltech,
FermiLab, CERN, University of Florida, and groups from the UK, Brazil,
and Korea, to defend its title as one of the fastest guns in the
West–or, more accurately, the largest bandwidth, the computing
equivalent.
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From left to right: Les Cottrell (SLAC), Michael
Chen (Chelsio) and Gary Buhrmaster (SLAC) display their
Bandwidth Challenge certificates at the SLAC/Fermilab booth at
SC2004. (Photo courtesy of Les Cottrell) |
In the Supercomputing 2004 Bandwidth Challenge
contest, they set a new world record for sustained bandwidth of 101
gigabits (Gbps) per second, fast enough to download three DVD movies per
second. This rate is four times faster than the record of 23 Gbps that
SLAC’s team set last year. Using roughly $400,000 of loaned equipment,
the SLAC team designed their part of the network before the
Supercomputing 2004 convention and then set it up upon arrival in
Pittsburgh, PA.
“The award in our case was given for the maximum utilization of all the
bandwidth,” said Les Cottrell. “We decided to show that we could utilize
high performance networks with the idea that they are very important for
high energy physics.”
Being able to transfer large amounts of information quickly is essential
to the success of geographically dispersed collaborations in scientific
communities. Currently, on a regular basis, several terabyte/day are
sent inter-continentally by SLAC alone, said Cottrell. The future needs
for High Energy Physics are anticipated to grow by a factor of 10 in the
next five years.
Collaboration is important for both the motivation for and the success
of the High Bandwidth Challenge.
“An interesting thing came out of this. Normally you expect companies to
be at each other’s throats, but here it’s very much a collaborative
thing, where everyone works together to try to make it work well,” said
Cottrell.
At the SLAC/FNAL booth at the convention, attendees watched a visual
display showing the amount of information transferring to and from CERN,
Florida, Fermilab, Caltech, UC San Diego, and Brazil.
Congratulations to the team for the award and for accepting the
challenge to expand the horizons of what is achievable.
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