ESnet’s Petascale DTN Project Speeds up Data Transfers between Leading HPC Centers
The Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Science operates three of the world’s leading supercomputing centers, where massive data sets are routinely imported, analyzed, used to create simulations and exported to other sites. Fortunately, DOE also runs a networking facility, ESnet (short for Energy Sciences Network), the world’s fastest network for science, which is managed by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Over the past two years, ESnet engineers have been working with staff at DOE labs to fine tune the specially configured systems called data transfer nodes (DTNs) that move data in and out of the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the leadership computing facilities at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois and Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. All three of the computing centers and ESnet are DOE Office of Science User Facilities used by thousands of researchers across the country.
The collaboration, named the Petascale DTN project, also includes the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, a leading center funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF). Together, the collaboration aims to achieve regular disk-to-disk, end-to-end transfer rates of one petabyte per week between major facilities, which translates to achievable throughput rates of about 15 Gbps on real world science data sets.
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