In the world of HPC, moving data is a sin. That may be changing.
Just a few weeks ago, AIC announced the successful completion of a landmark, 1-petabyte transfer of data in 34 hours, during a recent test by Zettar that relied on the company’s SB122A-PH, 1U 10-bay NVMe storage server. The milestone was reached using a unique 5000-mile 100Gbps loop which is a SDN layer over a shared, production 100G network operated by the US DOE’s ESNet.
“Any company that has high performance computing requirements stands to benefit from the equipment used in the recent 1-petabyte transfer test. Whether working with a content delivery network, big data, data centers, cloud service providers, or as a backup solution provider, you need a new solution for faster data throughput in order to remain competitive.”
As organizations find themselves creating, storing and working with ever-increasingly larger files and sets of data, it becomes imperative to come up with new solutions to speed up the transfer of information. Exascale computing will be essential for maintaining the nation’s prestige, advancing sciences, and improving the economic well-being of the society. For context, an exabyte is equivalent to 1,000 petabytes.
A wide range of industries will need to take advantage of exascale computing, oil and gas, media and entertainment, life sciences, defense and intelligence agencies, to name just a few. Newly emerging fields such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, digital transformation, and intelligent enterprises are no exceptions.
More Details
- Four of AIC’s SB122A-PH 10-Bay NVMe 1U storage servers were used in the test, along with 16 DC P3700 U.2 1.6TB NVMe solid-state drives from Intel’s Non-volatile Memory Solutions Group (NSG).
- AIC’s SB122A-PH is a commodity server that is symmetrical in architecture design, enabling it to deliver better performance than other servers currently on the market.
The test sent data on a unique 5,000-mile loop that goes from the US Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science (SC)’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory (SLAC) in Menlo Park of California, Sunnyvale of California, El Paso of Texas, Houston of Texas, Nashville of Tennessee, Atlanta of Georgia and back to SLAC/Menlo Park. This is the world’s only 5,000-mile 100Gbps loop available and has been established by the Energy Science Network (ESNet) for the SLAC (Zettar’s efforts since 2015). ESNet is operated by the DOE’s SC. It runs a state-of-the-art 100Gbps national backbone, which connects DOE SC laboratories together and to the other parts of the Internet.
Transparency is critical when it comes to evaluating high-speed data transfer milestones like the recent successful 1-petabyte effort. The test performed by Zettar is likely the only one in the world whose results were publicly viewable (and can be seen on the ESNet’s Network portal.
Zettar is more than capable of handling multiple PBs of high speed data transfers weekly and is a founding member of the exclusive and elite ‘Exascale-ready Club,'” said Dr. Chin Fang, Founder & CEO of Zettar Inc. “To be admitted in the first half of 2017, an organization or team must be capable of using a shared, production, point-to-point WAN link to attain a production data transfer rate that is equal or greater than 270PB-km/hour.”
