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| Wes
Bethel |
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| Jason
Lee |
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| Brian
Tierney |
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| Dan
Gunter |
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| Arie
Shoshani |
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| Alex
Sim |
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| Bill
Kramer |
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At
the SC2000 conference in Dallas, NERSC staff participated in two of
the three winning teams in a new competition, the Network Challenge
for Bandwidth-Intensive Applications. The competition was initiated
to demonstrate high-bandwidth applications and push the limits of
network capacity.
Wes
Bethel, Jason Lee, Brian Tierney, and Dan Gunter won the “Fastest
and Fattest” category for overall best performance for their demonstration
of Visapult (see page 21). They
recorded a peak performance level of 1.48 Gb/sec over a five-second
period. Overall, the Visapult team transferred 262 gigabits of data
in 60 minutes from Berkeley Lab to the SC2000 show fioor in Dallas,
with an average throughput of 582 Mb/sec.
“A
Data Management Infrastructure for Climate Modeling Research” took
top honors as the “Hottest Infrastructure” application. This application
was run by a team from the University of Southern California/Information
Sciences Institute, Argonne and Lawrence Livermore national laboratories,
and NERSC’s Arie Shoshani and Alex Sim. They achieved a peak performance
level of 1.03 Gb/sec.
These
accomplishments are the culmination of many years of research leadership
in high performance networking and data management by Berkeley Lab
computer scientists who now work in the NERSC Division. This research
included the development of the Distributed-Parallel Storage System
(DPSS), which was used in the Visapult demonstration, and STACS
(see page 24), which is part of the
climate modeling infrastructure.
The
SC2000 Network Challenge itself was made possible by SCinet, the
temporary but massive communications network which was assembled
and operated for the conference under the leadership of NERSC Deputy
Director Bill Kramer. With three OC-48 lines and three OC-12 lines,
SCinet offered a combined peak speed of 9.4 Gb/sec — more than 167,000
times faster than a typical residential Internet connection and
200 times as fast as the connections used by many universities.
For the first time in the history of the SC conference, SCinet also
provided wireless networking capability throughout the Dallas Convention
Center.
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