U-M researchers aid cyber feat

Updated 3:00 PM December 7, 2005

U-M researchers aid cyber feat

By Frank DeSanto
School of Information

U-M researchers are part of a team that recently won the prestigious Supercomputing 2005 Bandwidth Challenge (BWC), an elite annual competition designed to encourage innovation that will expand network capacity to deliver huge data flows to real-world science applications.

The group delivered a peak of more than 150 gigabits per second (Gbps) of data to the floor of the Supercomputing 2005 conference in Seattle Nov. 17. At that rate of transfer, it could have sent all of the Library of Congress's print content to Seattle in less than nine minutes.

The winning effort was a collaboration of researchers at several institutions, including U-M, Caltech, Fermi National Accelerator Lab and the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. The challenge showcased the high-speed transfer of particle physics data between collaborating labs located around the globe.

The BWC collaboration achieved a peak data transfer rate of 150.7 Gbps and sustained a rate in excess of 100 Gbps for several hours. Researchers connected a total of 22 10-Gbps "waves" of data feeds linked via fiber optics from partner institutions as far away as Brazil and Korea. Three of those waves originated at U-M, traveling the Michigan Lambda Rail to connect to international high-speed networks in Chicago, and from there to Seattle.

This year's winning effort was preparation for some of the most data-intensive science research ever conceived—analysis of particle collisions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) now under construction at CERN in Switzerland. Once the LHC goes online in late 2007 it is expected to produce 12-14 petabytes of data each year. That data will go out in near real-time for analysis by researchers at more than a dozen institutions.

"The Bandwidth Challenge is an interesting benchmark of what is possible with high-performance networking," says Shawn McKee, associate research scientist in the Physics Department and assistant research scientist with the Michigan Grid Research and Infrastructure Development (MGRID), and leader of the U-M group.

The data transfer rates and coordinated use of so many high-speed networking resources were, for the first time, in the range of what will be needed on an ongoing basis to conduct LHC science. But achieving that milestone in a dedicated experimental setting isn't the same as sustaining it reliably over the long term, McKee says.

"One shortcoming was that we weren't making a persistent disk copy of all the data received," he says. "We don't have the full end-to-end path at that level yet." Another remaining challenge, he says, is developing the network management infrastructure to support such massive data streams among LHC collaborators. He expects those challenges to be met by the time the LHC starts producing live data.

In addition to McKee, collaborators at U-M included MGRID members from the School of Information, Center for Information Technology Integration, Medical School and Information Technology Communications.

Thomas Finholt, research associate professor of information and acting MGRID director, says U-M's role in the 2005 BWC win shows the University is a frontline player in advancing cyberinfrastructure.

U-M researchers aid cyber feat

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