Grossman on ten years of bandwidth challenges

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Bob Grossman, whose posts we always look forward to here at the galactic regional headquarters of insideHPC, has a new one up this AM looking back on the past ten years of the Bandwidth Challenge at SC and commenting on the increasing need for pipes to move all the data around

Some of the history is available at the web site scinet.supercomputing.org. For example, in 2000, there were 2 OC-48 (2.5 Gbps) circuits that connected the research exhibits at the conference to external research networks and the challenge was to develop network protocols and applications that could fill these circuits. The winner of the BWC (called the Network Bandwidth Challenge in 2000) was a scientific visualization application called Visapult that reached 1.48 Gbps and transferred 262 GB in 1 hour (providing 582 Mbps of sustained bandwidth utilization).

This year, there were probably at least 20 10 GE circuits that connected research exhibits to external exhibits and one of the applications reached a bandwidth utilization of over 114 Gbps.