The award was presented at SC07, the world's largest international conference for high performance computing, networking, storage and analysis, being held this week in Reno, Nevada. <\/p>\n
The Bandwidth Challenge competition invites teams of technologists from the nation's most elite supercomputing facilities to push the limits of modern computer networks. <\/p>\n
The competition this year was based on the theme "serving as a model". Competitors were challenged to create methods for fully utilizing a high-speed network path to support end-to-end network applications running across a grid that included the conference's exhibit floor and the participant's home institutions using production networks. <\/p>\n
Using the IU Data Capacitor, a system designed to store and manipulate massive data sets, the IU team achieved a peak transfer rate of 18.21 Gigabits\/second out of a possible maximum of 20 Gigabits\/second. <\/p>\n
This performance was nearly twice the peak rate of the nearest competitor. The IU team achieved an overall sustained rate of 16.2 Gigabits\/second (roughly equivalent to sending 170 CDs of data per minute) using a transatlantic network path that included the Internet2, GÉANT, and DFN research networks. <\/p>\n
"This project simultaneously pushed the limits of networking and storage technology while demonstrating a reproducible model for remote data management. Best of all, we did this using a variety of research applications that we support every day at Indiana University," said Data Capacitor and Bandwidth Challenge project leader Stephen Simms.<\/p>\n