LHC data transport at SC07

Large volumes of LHC CMS data was shot around the U.S as part of a high-speed data transmission demonstration held during SC07 this week.
Images courtesy of ESnet

From the SC07 exhibition floor: Rick Summerhill and John Vollbrecht of Internet2 were part of the collaborative high-speed networking effort to move LHC data from Fermilab's Tier-1 computer center to a Tier-2 infrastructure in the Caltech booth at SC07.


Images courtesy of iSGTW The ultimate success of the Worldwide Large Hadron Collider (LHC) Computing Grid, and in turn of multi-billion dollar Large Hadron Collider, will heavily depend on an ability to move large volumes of data around the world at rates significantly in excess of 10 gigabits-per-second.

Paving the way for this success is a collaboration of research and industry technology leaders, who combined forces at last week's SC07 Conference in Reno, Nevada, U.S. to demonstrate their leading-edge capabilities in supporting the high-bandwidth needs of the worldwide research community.

Each member of the collaboration-involving Caltech, ESnet, Fermilab, Infinera, Internet2, Juniper Networks and Level 3 Communications-leveraged its unique networking, computation and storage capabilities to support the demonstrations.

"The cooperation between these leading technology organizations is a model of collaboration that propels innovation," said Rick Summerhill, chief technology officer at Internet2.
"Our members from industry and the research community are working together to push the technology boundaries so scientific researchers can do things that would have been unimaginable ten years ago," Summerhill said.

"These demonstrations are exemplary of the benefits resulting from sharing knowledge and resources to usher in the next wave of technological advancements."

The demonstration involved high-volume transmission of multiple 10 Gbps streams of data between Fermilab's LHC Tier-1 mass storage system and the SC07 show floor over a wide-area 40 Gbps network infrastructure, the highest-speed networking service available today.

The LHC Tier-1 then transferred data at speeds significantly in excess of 10 Gbps to the LHC Tier-2 computational infrastructure in the Caltech booth on the SC07 show floor.

Caltech's Center for Advanced Computing Research is home to the first LHC Tier-2 center and used its latest computing cluster to receive and store the multi-terabyte volumes of data.

The Tier-0 center and the LHC itself are hosted at CERN, which uses the GÉANT multi-gigabit pan-European network.