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HEP Collaborations Showcase Technology, Smash Bandwidth Record

November 17, 2004 HEP Collaborations Showcase Technology, Smash Bandwidth Record Fermilab and SLAC showcased their computing and networking achievements last week in Pittsburgh, at the SC2004 High Performance Computing, Networking and Storage Conference. The laboratories once again joined forces, and to put up the Computing for the Quantum Universe exhibit. In collaboration with other laboratories and universities, they won a competition for data transfer speed which quadrupled the record set the previous year. The high energy physics groups won the Fifth Annual HPC Bandwidth Challenge by transferring data into and out of the convention site at a rate of 101.3 Gigabit per second, roughly equivalent to transferring the contents of three DVD’s in just one second. The result demonstrates that networking capabilities will be up to the task of crunching through the unprecedented amounts of data from the LHC, said CD / CCF head Don Petravick. “It sets a vision and a scale for what can be done,” he said. Fermilab was able to join SLAC, CERN, Caltech and other high-energy physics research institutions in the challenge this year, thanks to a recently-deployed high-bandwidth optical fiber connection that links the lab to the StarLight optical network exchange in Chicago. Another one of the features that attracted visitors to the booth was a graphical animation of simulated beam debunching and rebunching in Fermilab’s Booster. The simulation can help accelerator physicists predict what would be the Booster’s response with different tunings of the machine, said CD’s Jim Amundson, who wrote the software with Panagiotis Spentzouris. The simulation ran on a tightly coupled QCD80 computer cluster. The Fermilab / SLAC booth will soon be on display in the Wilson Hall atrium, thanks to work done by John Urish and other members of CD to make this year’s exhibit easier to move and install. Public Affairs and the Computing Division look forward to introducing the Fermilab community to computing for the Quantum Universe. URL: www.fnal.gov/pub/today/archive_2004/today04-11-17.html