GridFTP puts bits in the fast lane

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Last week Argonne shared some news about field results with their GripFTP utility

GridFTP, a protocol developed by researchers at Argonne National Laboratory, has been used to transfer unprecedented amounts of data over the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Energy Sciences Network (ESnet), which provides a reliable, high-performance communications infrastructure to facilitate large-scale, collaborative science endeavors.

The Argonne-developed system proved key to enabling research groups at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee and the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center in California to move large data sets between the facilities at a rate of 200 megabytes per second.

For a point of comparison

GridFTP offers several advantages over other data transfer systems. For example, with Secure Copy, or scp, bulk transfer of a 33-gigabyte dataset between the two remote hosts could take up to eight hours. With GridFTP, almost 20 times that amount of data can be transferred in the same amount of time. And, unlike the transfer application FTP, GridFTP uses multiple data channels for improving the transfer speed.

What are your experiences with it?

Comments

  1. very nice tool. Provided you can adjust tcp-bs and number of pipelines accordingly. I’ve seen up to 850Mbit/s from the US to Europe using a single Gbit university uplink.

  2. It’s nice because you can set packet sizes and number of pipelines, to really get the most of of your network connection. It’s a shame about all the Grid nonsense strapped on to it.