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from the issue of March 2, 2006
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Researchers join global computer test
UNIVERSITY COMMUNICATIONS
A global collaboration of physicists and computer scientists announced Feb. 15 the successful completion of a test of the first truly worldwide grid-computing infrastructure. Grid computing is the coordinated use of computers that are spread around the world.
Researchers from two national laboratories and 10 universities across the United States, including UNL, participated in the test, which measured data transfer rates between the sites. Data was transferred around the world at a rate of up to one gigabyte (1 billion bytes) per second. That is about 4,000 times faster than the transfer rate for the cable modem connections available to the public.
Because of clean data transfer resulting from UNL researchers' efforts, UNL was able to take in 18 terabytes (18 trillion bytes) of data. That was more than the other universities, despite the fact that UNL received data at a slower rate (a maximum of 20 megabytes, or 20 million bytes per second) than the other schools, said UNL physicist Ken Bloom.
The test was part of the preparation for the international particle physics project known as the Compact Muon Solenoid, or CMS. The experiment will be conducted at the Large Hadron Collider, the world's largest particle accelerator, under construction at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) near Geneva, Switzerland. Scheduled to begin in 2007, the experiment will explore energy, matter, space and time.
Scientists and engineers around the world are creating a tiered hierarchy of computing facilities to deal with the huge amounts of data that will be created by CMS. UNL is a member of that hierarchy as one of seven Tier 2 sites that will be crunching the data.
"This challenge was a learning experience for all CMS computing in the United States, and for the Tier-2 sites in particular," said Bloom, Tier-2 coordinator for the U.S. CMS. "It was the largest and broadest test we have ever done of our computing capabilities, and, for some of the U.S. Tier-2 sites, the first major interaction with the broader world of LHC (Large Hadron Collider) computing, yet the six participating sites were among the leaders in the service challenge."
Bloom said the Tier-2 designation is significant for UNL, where he is co-primary investigator on the UNL part of the project with fellow physicist Aaron Dominguez and computer scientist David Swanson, director of the university's Research Computing Facilty.
In the months-long test, data was transferred from CERN to 12 major computing centers around the globe, and to more than 20 other computing facilities, 10 of which are at U.S. universities.
GO TO: ISSUE OF MARCH 2
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