For the second consecutive year, the “High Energy Physics” team of physicists, computer scientists and network engineers led by the California Institute of Technology and their partners joined forces at the Supercomputing 2004 (SC04) Bandwidth Challenge to capture the Sustained Bandwidth Award.
Their demonstration of “High Speed TeraByte Transfers for Physics” achieved a throughput of 101 gigabits per second (Gbps) to and from the show floor, which exceeds the previous year's mark of 23.2 Gbps, set by the same team, by a factor of more than four.
The record data transfer speed is equivalent to downloading three full DVD movies per second
The record data transfer speed is equivalent to downloading three full DVD movies per second, or transmitting all of the content of the Library of Congress in 15 minutes. It also has been estimated to be approximately 5% of the total rate of production of new content on Earth during the test.
The Bandwidth Challenge allowed the scientists and engineers to preview the globally distributed Grid system that is now being developed in the US and Europe in preparation for the next generation of high energy physics experiments scheduled to begin operation in 2007.
The high energy physics team showed that this vision of a worldwide dynamic Grid supporting many Terabyte and larger data transactions is practical.
It is expected that networking on this scale in support of the largest science projects, will be commonplace within the next three to five years.
The team hopes this new demonstration will encourage scientists and engineers in many sectors of society to develop and plan to deploy a new generation of revolutionary Internet applications.
Multi-gigabit/s end-to-end network performance will lead to new models for how research and business is performed.
Scientists will be empowered to form "virtual organizations" on a planetary scale, sharing in a flexible way their collective computing and data resources.
Harvey Newman, Professor of Physics at Caltech and head of the team said, "This is a breakthrough for the development of global networks and Grids, as well as inter-regional cooperation in science projects at the high energy frontier. There are also profound implications for how we could integrate information sharing and on-demand audiovisual collaboration in our daily lives, with a scale and quality previously unimaginable.”