Boffins send 60 million MB around the world in 10 days

IN ONE of the world's biggest grid computing projects, UK boffins at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL) in Oxfordshire managed to transfer 60 million megabytes of data around the world in ten days.

Apparently, if you use your standard BT connection you will be waiting another 30 years to send that much.

It is all part of the GridPP project, a UK effort by particle physicists to prepare for the massive data volumes expected from the next wave of experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's biggest particle physics experiment, being built at CERN in Switzerland.

However, this is just stage two of the project. The boffins need to get their network to run at more than 600 megabytes per second (MB/s) for 10 days, by 2007. By the way trying to download that long on your BT connection would take you about 250 years.

To boost the speed, RAL must substantially increase its data acceptance rates from the current 70MB/s. During the next test in July, RAL will has to hit rates of 150MB/s over one month while archiving part of the data to tape.

By April 2006, rates of 220MB/s will be handled, with tests to accept 72 hour bursts of data at twice this rate. By 2007, the RAL computing centre will have to do that and serve data to its downstream UK university sites and feed its vast 1000 processor computing cluster.

A spokesman was confident that RAL could meet this challenge having already carried out internal load tests of almost 400MB/s using only four of its total of 60 available disk servers. µ

L'INQ
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