PHYSICS

Neterion announced that its Xframe adapters were used in the network infrastructure of the High Energy Physics team led by Caltech, SLAC, Fermilab, CERN, the University of Michigan and other partners, which established a new world network speed record during the 6th Bandwidth Challenge at the recently concluded Supercomputing 2005 Conference in Seattle. Neterion has been an active member in the Bandwidth Challenge for the past several years and partnered with the same team that won the title last year. The company provided 80 Xframe adapters for the race this year, along with extensive pre-show and on-site support to help implement the global network, which involved applications running on multiple sites throughout the US and overseas, connected through 10 Gbps links. The network recorded a peak throughput of 151 Gbps and an official mark of 131.6 Gbps. 470 terabytes of physics data were transported over a 24 hour period. These speeds are equivalent to downloading five full DVD movies per second, or serving 10,000 MPEG2 HDTV movies simultaneously in real time, or transmitting all of the printed content of the Library of Congress in 10 minutes. "Considering the level of competition in the SC05 Bandwidth Challenge, to be a part of the winning team for the second year in a row is a tremendous validation of the performance and reliability of our Xframe adapters," said Leonid Grossman, Founder and Vice President of Software Engineering at Neterion. "This shows how 10 Gigabit Ethernet can enable high-speed collaboration and sharing of data on research projects and impact a wide range of scientific applications." According to the scientists at the show, this type of network performance is vital for projects on the frontiers of research in "data intensive" fields such as particle physics, astronomy, bioinformatics, global climate modeling, geosciences, atomic fusion and neutron science. "This demonstration allowed us to preview the globally distributed Grid system of more than 100 laboratory and university-based computing facilities that is now being developed in the US and Europe in preparation for the next generation of high energy physics experiments at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) that will begin operation in 2007," said Professor Harvey Newman of Caltech, head of the High Energy Physics team. "The analysis of this data will allow physicists at CERN to search for the Higgs particles thought to be responsible for mass in the universe, supersymmetry, and other fundamentally new phenomena bearing on the nature of matter and spacetime, in an energy range made accessible by the LHC for the first time." While the SC05 demonstration required a major effort by the teams involved and their sponsors, in partnership with major research and education network organizations in the U.S., Europe, Latin America and Asia Pacific, it is expected that networking on this scale in support of the largest science projects (such as the LHC) will be commonplace within a few years. The team hopes this new demonstration will encourage scientists and engineers in many sectors of society to develop and plan to deploy a new generation of revolutionary Internet applications. Further detail on the record can be found on the Caltech Web site at its Web site.