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DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION
FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY /
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Special Features:
BANDWIDTH CHALLENGE TO PUSH LIMITS
OF TECHNOLOGY AT SC2003
A new winner of the coveted High Performance Bandwidth Challenge award will
be
crowned this year at SC2003, the annual conference for high-performance
computing and communications, as three-time winner Lawrence Berkeley National
Laboratory retires from the field. In the Bandwidth Challenge, contestants
from science and engineering research communities around the world will use
the conference's state-of-the-art network infrastructure to demonstrate the
latest technologies and applications, many of which are so demanding that no
ordinary computer network could sustain them.
At SC2003, to be held Nov. 15-20 in Phoenix, the eight contestants will be
challenged to "significantly stress" the SCinet network infrastructure while
moving meaningful data files across the multiple research networks that
connect to SCinet, the conference's temporary but powerful on-site network
infrastructure. The primary standard of performance will be verifiable network
throughput as measured from the contestant's equipment through the SCinet
switches and routers to external connections.
Continuing a tradition started at SC2000, Qwest Communications is awarding
monetary prizes for applications that make the most effective or "courageous"
use of SCinet resources.
"SCinet will provide three OC-192c wide-area network interconnects, at 9.6
gigabits per second apiece, to the Phoenix Convention Center," said Kevin
Walsh of the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), the coordinator of this
year's competition. "It's going to take some really big, high bandwidth
applications to stress this network. Fortunately, the contestants this year
look to be up to the challenge."
The Bandwidth Challenge contest entries for SC2003 include:
- Bandwidth Lust: Distributed Particle Physics Analysis using Ultra High
Speed TCP on the GRiD. Stanford University will show several components of a
Grid-enabled distributed Analysis Environment being developed to search for
the Higgs particles thought to be responsible for mass in the universe, and
for other signs of new physics processes to be explored using particle
colliders at CERN, SLAC and FNAL. It will use data from simulated events
resulting from proton-proton collisions at 14 TeraelectronVolts as they would
appear in CERN 's Large Hadron Collider Compact Muon Solenoid experiment
(under construction).
- Concurrent Multi-Location Write to Single File. An
industry-academic-government team (YottaYotta, SGI Inc, Navy Research Labs,
University of Tennessee, StarLight, CANARIE, Netera Alliance, WestGrid) will
demonstrate collaborative data processing over very large distances using a
distributed file system. Servers across North America (StarLight, Phoenix and
Edmonton) will read and write concurrently to a single file. Transmission of
data between sites using TCP/IP will leverage distributed cache coherence so
that all sites read and write to a single globally consistent data image yet
maintain near local I/O rates. Aggregate throughput to disk should be in
excess of 10 gigabits per second.
- Distributed Lustre File System Demonstration. Using the Lustre File
System,
a team of NCSA, SDSC and several industry partners will demonstrate both
clustered and remote file system access, over local (the ASCI booth) very high
bandwidth links (80 gigabits per second) combined with remote (10 Gb per
second) access over the 2,000 miles between Phoenix and NCSA. Compute nodes in
both locations will access servers in both locations and will read and write
concurrently to a single file and to multiple files spread across the servers.
Aggregate performance to disk should be tens of gigabits per second.
- Grid Technology Research Center Gfarm File System. The National Institute
of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology of Japan (AIST) will replicate
terabyte-scale experimental data between the United States and Japan over
several OC-48 links. Four clusters in Japan and one in the United States
constitute a Grid virtual file system, federating local file systems on each
cluster node. The expected file transfer rate between the United States and
Japan -- about 10,000 km or 6,000 miles -- is expected to be at least 3
gigabits per second.
- High Performance Grid-Enabled Data Movement with Striped GridFTP. A team
based at the San Diego Supercomputer Center with Argonne National Laboratory
participation will demonstrate striped GridFTP from an application,
transferring several files over 1 TB in size between a 40-node Grid site at
SDSC and a 40-node Grid site at SC2003. By harnessing the power of multiple
nodes and multiple network interfaces with Striped GridFTP, data can be
transferred in parallel efficiently. The GridFTP file transfer is integrated
into VISTA, a rendering toolkit from SDSC, for data visualization.
Applications and datasets include code and files from the National Virtual
Observatory project and the Southern California Earthquake Center.
- High Performance Grid-Enabled Data Movement with GPFS. The same SDSC-based
team will demonstrate the use of the IBM General Parallel File System (GPFS)
to transfer several files over 1 TB in size between a 40-node Grid site at
SDSC and a 40-node Grid site at SC2003. Again, the file transfer is integrated
into the VISTA rendering toolkit for data visualization, and applications and
datasets include code and files from the National Virtual Observatory project
and the Southern California Earthquake Center.
- Multi-Continental Telescience. This multidisciplinary entry will showcase
technology and partnerships encompassing telescience, microscopy, biomedical
informatics, optical networking, next-generation protocols and collaborative
research. The demo will include globally distributed resources and users in
the United States, Argentina, Japan, Korea, the Netherlands, Sweden and
Taiwan. High network bandwidth and IPv6 enhance the control of multiple high
data-rate instruments of different types, enable interactive multi-scale
visualization of data pulled from the BIRN Grid and facilitate large-scale
Grid-enabled computation. High-performance visualization, tele-instrumentation
and infrastructure for collaborative data-sharing all converge to solve
multi-scale challenges in biomedical imaging.
- Project DataSpace. A team associated with the National Center for Data
Mining at the University of Illinois at Chicago will transport a terabyte of
geoscience data between Amsterdam and Phoenix, and will demonstrate high
performance Web services for a distributed application involving astronomical
data distributed between Chicago, Amsterdam and Phoenix. The demo involves the
Web service based DataSpace Transfer Protocol (DSTP) and the SABUL and UDT
application layer libraries for high performance network transport, which were
developed as part of Project DataSpace.
The contestants are a remarkable mix of the best of academia, government
and
industry. Most of the demos are collaborations among several institutions.
The Multi-Continental Telescience effort is an excellent example of
international and interdisciplinary collaboration. It involves the NPACI
Telescience project, Telescience, the Biomedical Informatics Research Network
(BIRN), OptIPuter, and the Pacific Rim Applications and Grid Middleware
Assembly (PRAGMA), with participants from SDSC, University of California-San
Diego, Universidad de Buenos Aires, Karolinska Institute in Sweden, Osaka
University, Japan's KDDI R&D Labs, the Center for Ultra High Voltage
Microscopy in Osaka and Taiwan's National Center for High Performance
Computing -- a truly global effort.
Similarly, the Distributed Lustre demo involves SDSC, NCSA, Intel, Foundry
Networks, Supermicro, DataDirect Networks and CFS. Project DataSpace includes
participants from the University of Illinois at Chicago, Northwestern
University, the University of Amsterdam, SURFNet, Johns Hopkins University and
Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
Judging criteria for the Bandwidth Challenge go beyond raw speed. Judges
also
will base their awards on such factors as the quality of first-time
demonstrations, improvement over previously demonstrated methods, the
efficiency and effectiveness of multi-continent implementations and
applicability to real-world problems. Technological criteria also involve the
measurement of sustained TCP utilization, innovative features of "custom" TCP
implementations and the quality of IPv6 implementations.
"The Bandwidth Challenge is important for many reasons," Walsh said. "It
publicizes the state of the art to our colleagues in the high-performance
networking and computing community. Hardware and software vendors try to prove
that their products are at the forefront of technology. And perhaps most
significant of all, it serves as an inspiration to the scientific community --
researchers see applications doing things that were impossible a year or two
ago, and think to themselves, 'Hmmm ... I wonder what I could do with that
much bandwidth?'"
The winners will be announced at SC2003 on Nov. 20. For more information on
the contest entries, see scinet.supercomp.org/2003/bwc/entries.html.
An Outstanding Tradition
The High Performance Bandwidth Challenge began at SC2000 in Dallas, and has
grown in complexity and aspirations every year. Ten outstanding entries
competed in the third High Performance Bandwidth Challenge at SC2002 in
Baltimore.
For the third year in a row, a team from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
won the competition for "Highest Performing Application" with a wide-area
distributed simulation that demonstrated a peak data transfer rate of 16.8
gigabits per second -- more than five times higher than the team's
record-setting performance at the SC2001 conference and roughly 300,000 times
faster than a home Internet user would get from a 56K dial-up connection. The
winning application, "Wide Area Distributed Simulations using Cactus, Globus
and Visapult," modeled gravitational waves generated during the collision of
black holes and visualized the results in real time. The team used clusters of
computers at seven sites in the United States, the Czech Republic, the
Netherlands and Poland. The combination of two scientific applications --
Cactus, which simulated the collisions of black holes and neutron stars, and
Visapult, which did real-time parallel volume rendering of the data provided
by the simulation code -- running on clusters on different continents stressed
the network to its fullest capacity. Several entries in this year's
competition promise to double or triple the throughput of last year's Berkeley
Lab demo.
Project DataSpace, which was demonstrated by a team from the National Center
for Data Mining at the University of Illinois-Chicago, CANARIE, Northwestern
University, SARA (Stichting Academisch Rekencentrum) and StarLight, won the
award for "Best Use of Emerging Network Infrastructure." Will the Project
DataSpace team win two in a row? "Data Reservoir," an application demonstrated
by Fujitsu Laboratories and the University of Tokyo, won the award for the
"Most Efficient Use of Available Bandwidth," with a peak of 585 megabits per
second. The trans-Pacific links were relatively slow, but the judges
appreciated that the links were used to their fullest capacity.
SCinet Makes It Happen
To support Bandwidth Challenge contestants, SCinet expedites access to the
networks, provides technical support, and makes arrangements for equipment and
floor and rack space to applicants.
Volunteers from educational institutions, high performance computing sites,
network OEMs, research networks and telecommunications carriers work together
to design, implement and operate the SCinet networks. OEMs and carriers donate
much of the equipment and services needed to build the LAN and WAN
infrastructure. Planning begins more than a year in advance of each SC
conference and culminates with installation only seven days before the
conference begins. For a brief time in November, the SCinet infrastructure is
one of the most capable networks in the world. The Bandwidth Challenge event
is sponsored by SCinet and Qwest Communications as the founding corporate
sponsor and by SCinet as the SC2003 Committee sponsor. The Bandwidth Challenge
is made possible by vital contributions to the SCinet infrastructure from
Force10 Networks, NetOptics, Procket Networks, Level(3) Communications,
Sorrento Networks and Spirent Communications.
In addition to sponsoring the Bandwidth Challenge, Qwest Communications is
continuing its longstanding relationship with SCinet, supporting several
significant activities: provisioning 10 gigabits and 2.5 gigabits per second
optical network links (lambdas) using Qwest QWave to support connections from
the ESnet (Sunnyvale, Calif.) and Abilene (Los Angeles) POPs to the Los
Angeles cross-connect; providing additional 2.5 gigabit per second connections
to Abilene in Seattle to support the planned demonstrations from Japan; and
providing dark fiber in the Phoenix metropolitan area. For 2003, SCinet is
providing direct wide area connectivity to Abilene, TeraGrid, ESnet, DREN and
many other networks through peering relationships with these networks.
Level(3) Communications is delivering three separate 10-Gb-per-second lambdas,
utilizing the (3)Link Global Wavelength service to provide a total of more
than 30 billion bits per second of bandwidth into Phoenix from a major
cross-connect location in Los Angeles; Level(3) also is providing premium IP
service for exhibitors and attendees.
Now in its 16th year, the annual SC conference is sponsored by the Institute
of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Computer Society and the Association
for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Computer Architecture.
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