Berkeley Lab Team Wins Third Bandwidth Challenge

The Bandwidth Challenge competition at the annual SC conference on high performance computing and networking has been a showcase for emerging Grid technologies and applications. At SC2002, the Berkeley Lab team achieved their third consecutive victory with a data transfer rate five times faster than the previous year’s top speed. The team won top honors for the Highest Performing Application, moving data at a peak speed of 16.8 GB/s.

The team used clusters of computers at seven sites in the United States, the Netherlands, and the Czech Republic. Entitled “Wide Area Distributed Simulations Using Cactus, Globus, and Visapult,” the winning application modeled gravitational waves generated during the collision of black holes. Participating sites were the PDSF at NERSC and clusters at the SC2002 conference in Baltimore, Argonne National Laboratory, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, the University of Amsterdam, and the Masaryk University in the Czech Republic. Support was provided by the Albert Einstein Institute in Germany, the Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center in Poland, DOE’s Energy Sciences Network (ESnet), Sandia National Laboratories, SysKonnect, Hewlett-Packard, and Force10 Networks Inc.

	Figure 1   The SC2001 Bandwidth Challenge Team included staff from Berkeley Lab’s Computational Research (CRD), Information Technologies and Services (ITSD), and NERSC Center divisions. Shown here are Wes Bethel (CRD), George Smith (NERSC), Alfred Early (ITSD), John Christman (ITSD), Eli Dart (NERSC), Brent Draney (NERSC), Mike Bennett (ITSD), David Paul (NERSC), and John Shalf (CRD). The SC2002 team also included NERSC’s Cary Whitney and Shane Canon (see photo).

The team ran the Visapult volume rendering application at SC2002 to create visualizations from the simulations being run on the participating clusters. The OC-192 and OC-48 lines that fed the Baltimore convention center were aggregated into three 10 Gigabit Ethernet links to a Force10 Networks switch that fed the HP/Compaq Linux cluster in the Berkeley Lab booth on the show floor. The team used a cluster of Alpha-based computers loaned by Hewlett-Packard and SysKonnect network interface cards to put together the winning effort.

Wes Bethel, the head of Berkeley Lab’s Visualization Group and developer of Visapult, said that improvements in Visapult, along with the evolving networking and Grid infrastructure of hardware, software, and middleware, helped push the team’s data transfer to such a high rate.

The High-Performance Bandwidth Challenge encourages teams of researchers from around the world to use, if not swamp, the SC conference network to demonstrate applications using huge amounts of data. The Berkeley Lab team won the first ever Bandwidth Challenge at SC2000, moving data at an average of 596 MB/s over 60 minutes and hitting a peak of 1.48 GB/s over a five-second period. At the SC2001 conference, the team (Figure 1) took the top prize by achieving a sustained network performance level of 3.3 GB/s.