SCinet
Bandwidth Challenge Winners Announced
High-Performance
Bandwidth Challenge
Continuing the tradition started at SC2000, SCinet and Qwest Communications
are sponsoring the Third Annual High-performance Bandwidth Challenge.
For the Bandwidth Challenge, applicants from science and engineering
research communities across the globe will use the unique SCinet infrastructure
to demonstrate emerging techniques or applications, many of which
consume enormous amounts of network resources. At SC2001, a single
application consumed more than 3 billion bits per second (Gbps). Another
application creatively consumed (squandered?) significant aggregate
amounts of bandwidth by connecting to a large number of remote sites.
For SC2002, applicants are challenged to significantly stress the SCinet network infrastructure while delivering innovative application value on an OC-48 or higher (OC-192!) interconnect. In turn, SCinet facilitates access to the networks, provides technical support to applicants, and makes arrangements for equipment and floor and rack space to applicants with demonstrable needs.
Qwest Communications is sponsoring the award of one or more monetary prizes for the applications that make the most effective and/or courageous use of SCinet resources. The primary measure of performance will be the verifiable network throughput as measured from the contestant's booth through the SCinet switches and routers to external connections.
Seven full proposals
were received prior to the initial application deadline. The abstracts
received with these proposals are provided here.
Bandwidth Gluttony
- Distributed Grid-Enabled Particle Physics Event Analysis over enhanced
TCP/IP
Submitted by Julian Bunn, California Institute of Technology
"Using distributed databases at Caltech, CERN, possibly UCSD
and other HEP institutes, we will show a particle physics analysis
application that issues remote database selection queries, prepares
virtual data object collections, moves those collections across the
WAN using specially enhanced TCP/IP stacks, and renders the results
in real time on the analysis client workstation in Baltimore. This
scheme is a preview of a general "Grid Enabled Analysis Environment"
that is being developed for CERN's LHC experiments. It makes use of
modified TCP with Adaptive Queue Management to achieve excellent throughput
for large data transfers in the WAN."
Bandwidth to
the World
Submitted by Les Cottrell, Stanford Linear Accelerator Center
"The unprecedented avalanche of data already being generated
by and for new and future High Energy and Nuclear Physics (HENP) experiments
at Labs such as SLAC, FNAL, KEK and CERN is demanding new strategies
for how the data is collected, shared, analyzed and presented. For
example, the SLAC BaBar experiment and JLab are each already collecting
over a TByte/day, and BaBar expects to increase by a factor of 2 in
the coming year. The Fermilab CDF and D0 experiments are ramping up
to collect similar amounts of data, and the CERN LHC experiment expects
to collect over ten million TBytes. The strategies being adopted to
analyze and store this unprecedented amount of data is the coordinated
deployment of Grid technologies such as those being developed for
the Particle Physics Data Grid and the Grid Physics Network. It is
anticipated that these technologies will be deployed at hundreds of
institutes that will be able to search out and analyze information
from an interconnected worldwide grid of tens of thousands of computers
and storage devices. This in turn will require the ability to sustain
over long periods the transfer of large amounts of data between collaborating
sites with relatively low latency. The Bandwidth to the World project
is designed to demonstrate the current data transfer capabilities
to several sites with high performance links, worldwide. In a sense
the site at SC2002 is acting like a HENP tier 0 or tier 1 site (an
accelerator or major computation site) in distributing copies of the
raw data to multiple replica sites. The demonstration will be over
real live production networks with no efforts to manually limit other
traffic. Since, by turning off the 10Gbps link, we will be able to
saturate our 1 Gbps link to SCinet and control the router in our booth,
which will be at one end of the congested link, we also hope to be
able to investigate/demonstrate the effectiveness of QBone Scavenger
Service (QBSS) in managing competing traffic flows and on the response
time of lower volume interactive traffic on high performance links."
Data Services
and Visualization
Submitted by Helen Chen, Sandia National Laboratories
"The ability to do effective problem setup and analysis of simulation
results is critical to a complete, balanced problem-solving environment
for ASCI. Research scientists and analysts must be able to efficiently
design complex computational experiments, as well as be able to see
and understand the results of those experiments in a manner that enables
unprecedented confidence in simulation results. We demonstrate two
visualization techniques that utilize a 10Gbps network infrastructure
to deliver robust data services for the management and comprehension
of very large and complex data sets. The LBL Visapult application
visualizes a large scientific data set that is stored in an InfinARRAY
File System (IAFS). IAFS aggregates, over TCP/IP, the storage of a
number of physical file systems into a single virtual file system.
Its performance is determined by the interconnect bandwidth, and the
number of parallel storage processors in the system, thereby offering
a very scalable solution for servicing scientific supercomputing.
A possible alternative to IAFS is to employ remote storage, using
the emerging IP storage technology such as iFCP and iSCSI as the data
source to Visapult. The Sandia V2001 is an Interactive Video System
that transports high-resolution video over local- or wide-area IP
networks. A V2001 Encoder connects to the DVI or RGB video from a
computer as if it were a flat panel monitor. It delivers the video
signal presented at its video port over Gigabit Ethernet. At the visualization
end, a V2001 Decoder displays the received signal to a panel monitor
connected via its DVI or RGB port. The V2001 Decoder provides low-latency
interactivity on remote images using an USBbased keyboard and mouse."
Global Telescience
featuring IPv6
Submitted by Mark Ellisman, National Center for Microscopy and Imaging
Research (NCMIR)
"The NCMIR Lab at the University of California (UCSD) and the
San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) intends to demonstrate another
"real" scientific application utilizing native IPv6 and
a mixture of high bandwidth and low latency. In our demonstration
we will feature a network enabled end-to-end system for 3D tomography
utilizing network resources to remotely control an Intermediate Voltage
Electron Microscope, transfer data to remote storage resources and
complete compute jobs on distributed heterogeneous computer systems.
The process of finding features using the microscope is a visually
guided task in which users must distinguish features in a low contrast
high noise medium. The nature of this task calls for the highest video
quality possible when navigating the specimen in the microscope. To
address these challenges, the Telescience system is actively integrating
digital video over native IPv6 networks providing high quality low
latency video for use in navigation of the specimen in the microscope.
Similar to our presentation last year, we will continue to improve
upon past achievements. This year's demo will feature higher bandwidth
usage as well as other technological improvements."
Grid Datafarm
for a HEP Application
Submitted by Osamu Tatebe, National Institute of Advanced Industrial
Science and Technology (AIST)
"This is a high-energy physics application that simulates the
ATLAS detector, which will be operational by 2007 at CERN. Currently,
six clusters, three in US and three in Japan, comprise a cluster-of-cluster
filesystem (Gfarm filesystem). The FADS/Goofy simulation code based
on the Geant4 toolkit simulates the ATLAS detector and generates hits
collection (raw data) in this Gfarm filesystem. Physically, each cluster
generates the corresponding part of hits collection, and stores it
to its cluster filesystem, which will be replicated to all other cluster
filesystems, although every operation is uniformly performed on the
Gfarm cluster-of-cluster filesystem. Replicated files will be transparently
accessed, and used for fault tolerance and load balancing."
Real-Time Terascale
Computation for 3D Tele-Immersion
Submitted by Herman Towles, University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill
"Tele-Immersion, an ability to share presence with distant individuals,
situations and environments, may provide vast new possibilities for
human experience and interaction in the near future. Combining correlation-based
3D reconstruction and view-dependent stereo display technologies,
the University of Pennsylvania and the University of North Carolina
have previously demonstrated a prototype 3D tele-immersion system
running over Abilene between Philadelphia and Chapel Hill. Working
with the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, we are now working to harness
the massive computational power of PSC s new Terascale Computing System
(lemieux) to improve our reconstruction volume, reconstruction quality
and frame rate performance. We propose to demonstrate 3D tele-immersion
using the remote computational resources of the Pittsburgh Supercomputing
Center to do high-quality, 3D reconstruction of a dynamically changing,
room-size environment at SC2002 and to display it with view-dependent
stereo at a nearby office-like booth. We will set up both these environments
at SC2002 an office for acquisition and an office with display. In
the latter office, there will be a large projective stereo display
providing a live, 3D portal into the acquisition office. The display
will use passive stereo technology with position tracking of the user
for view-dependent rendering. The first office and occupant(s) will
be acquired with an array of up to 45 cameras. Raw 2D images from
the acquisition office (at SC2002 in Baltimore) will be transported
to PSC (in Pittsburgh) and processed into a 3D scene description in
real-time. This 3D scene description will then be transported back
to the display office (at SC2002 in Baltimore) for 3D rendering. In
addition to this remote interactive compute mode, we will provide
a local reconstruction mode (that runs without PSC) and a local playback
mode of pre-computed reconstructions for those times when remote computing
or networking resources are not available."
Wide Area Distributed
Simulations using Cactus, Globus and Visapult
Submitted by John Shalf, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
"We will perform a "hero calculation" of unprecedented
scale that will consume unprecedented amounts of network bandwidth.
The calculation will model gravitational waves generated during the
collision of black holes. A single simulation will be distributed
amongst several MPP supercomputers at several sites. The distributed
simulation will send simulation results over multiple high-capacity
network links to the SC02 show floor for visualization and analysis.
We expect this year's entry to set new records for extreme bandwidth
consumption. This year's entry builds on the effort of our winning
SC2001 entry in several important aspects. We will demonstrate a system
that provides tracking, remote monitoring, management interfaces,
and high performance parallel visualization of supercomputing simulations
that span across multiple parallel supercomputers on the Grid. We
will also demonstrate both fault-resilient unreliable protocols and
even some custom reliable protocols are capable of using all available
networking resources with a high degree of efficiency. This endeavor
will lay the groundwork for the kind of tools necessary for making
efficient use of high performance research networks to support Grid
and metacomputing activities. The entry will consist of the Cactus
code framework, the Visapult parallel visualization system and Globus
Grid infrastructure. The Cactus code will run across multiple parallel
supercomputers at different sites including NERSC, LBNL, Sandia, Poland
and other similar resources using MPICH-G2 for MPI and Globus GRAM
for job launching/management. The Cactus steering infrastructure will
be used to remotely control the running code and the Visapult system
will provide extremely high performance parallel visualization of
the current physics being evolved by Cactus using cluster computers
located on the SC2002 show floor."
Data Reservoir
Submitted by Kei Hiraki, University of Tokyo
Data Reservoir is a data sharing system that uses very high-speed
internet connections (up to 100Gbps) between distant locations. The
Data Reservoir utilizes the low-level iSCSI protocol and has filesystem
transparency.
Parallel data transfer with hierarchical data striping is a key factor
in achieving full bandwidth of the highspeed network. Our system has
two nodes that are connected by a 10Gbps link, and each node consists
of dozens of 1U IA-servers and a 10Gbps-capable switch. Our software
environment is RedHat Linux and uses NFS and the iSCSI driver.
Below is a schedule for presentation of the High-Performance Bandwidth Challenge Entries. All demonstrations will take place on the exhibit hall show floor.
