Using a 5,000-mile network loop operated by ESnet, researchers at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory (SLAC) and Zettar Inc. recently transferred 1 petabyte in 29 hours, with encryption and checksumming, beating last year’s record by 5 hours, an almost 15 percent improvement.
The project is aimed at achieving the high data transfer rates needed to accommodate the amount of data to be generated by the Linac Coherent Light Source II (LCLS II), which is expected to come online in 2020. The LCLS is the world’s first hard X-ray free-electron laser (XFEL) and its strobe-like pulses are just a few millionths of a billionth of a second long, and a billion times brighter than previous X-ray sources. LCLS II will provide a major jump in capability – moving from 120 pulses per second to 1 million pulses per second. Scientists use LCLS to take crisp pictures of atomic motions, watch chemical reactions unfold, probe the properties of materials and explore fundamental processes in living things.
The increased capability is expected to generate data transfers of multiple terabits per second– as the experimental results are sent from SLAC to Department of Energy’s (DOE) supercomputing facilities for analysis. As the DOE’s dedicated network user facility for scientific research, ESnet carries data between universities and DOE’s national laboratories and national user facilities along a multi-100 gigabits-per-second (Gbps) backbone network.
This screen shot from MyESnet shows the southern links of the network dark red, indicating data transfers exceeding 50 Gbps during the 5,000-mile transfer conducted by SLAC and Zettar Inc.