Linac Coherent Laser Source (LCLS-II): Data Transfer Requirements

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In this video from the Stanford HPC Conference, Les Cottrell from the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, at Stanford University presents: Linac Coherent Laser Source (LCLS-II): Data Transfer Requirements.

“Funded by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) the LCLS is the world’s first hard X-ray free-electron laser. Its strobe-like pulses are just a few millionths of a billionth of a second long, and a billion times brighter than previous X-ray sources. Scientists use LCLS to take crisp pictures of atomic motions, watch chemical reactions unfold, probe the properties of materials and explore fundamental processes in living things.

Its performance to date, over the first few years of operation, has already provided a breathtaking array of world-leading results, published in the most prestigious academic journals and has inspired other XFEL facilities to be commissioned around the world. LCLS-II will build from the success of LCLS to ensure that the U.S. maintains a world-leading capability for advanced research in chemistry, materials, biology and energy. It is planned to see first light in 2020. LCLS-II will provide a major jump in capability – moving from 120 pulses per second to 1 million pulses per second. This will enable researchers to perform experiments in a wide range of fields that are now impossible. The unique capabilities of LCLS-II will yield a host of discoveries to advance technology, new energy solutions and our quality of life.

Analysis of the data will require transporting huge amounts of data from SLAC to supercomputers at other sites to provide near real-time analysis results and feedback to the experiments. The talk will introduce LCLS and LCLS-II with a short video, discuss its data reduction, collection, data transfer needs and current progress in meeting these needs.”

Dr. Roger Les. Cottrell is the Manager of Networking at SLAC National Accelerator Center, Stanford University. Les left the University of Manchester, England with a Ph.D. in Nuclear Physics to pursue fame and fortune on the Left Coast of the U.S.A. I joined SLAC as a research physicist in High Energy Physics, focusing on real-time data acquisition and analysis in the 1990 Nobel prize winning group that discovered the quark.

Dr. Cottrell spent a year’s leave of absence as a visiting scientist at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, and later at the IBM U.K. Laboratories at Hursley, England, where he obtained United States Patent 4,688,181 for a dynamic graphical cursor.

He was US leader of the effort that, in 1994, resulted in the first permanent Internet connection to mainland China. He was the co-PI of teams that captured the Internet2 Land Speed Record twice, a feat that was entered in the Guinness Book of World Records. In 2003, 2004, and for a third time in 2005 he was the co-leader of the teams that won the SuperComputing Bandwidth Challenge for the maximum bandwidth utilization.

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