Caltech quadruples Internet speed

For the second consecutive year, the High Energy Physics Team, a group of physicists, computer scientists, and network engineers, has won the Supercomputing Bandwidth Challenge with a sustained data transfer of 101 gigabits per second (Gbps) between Pittsburgh and Los Angeles. This is more than four times faster than last year’s record of 23.2 gigabits per second, which was set by the same team.

The team hopes this new demonstration will encourage scientists and engineers in many sectors of society to develop and deploy a new generation of revolutionary Internet applications.

The international team is led by Caltech and includes partners from institutions throughout the world. The group’s “High-Speed TeraByte Transfers for Physics” record data transfer speed is equivalent to downloading three full DVD movies per second, or transmitting all of the contents of the Library of Congress in 15 minutes, and it corresponds to approximately 5 percent of the rate at which all forms of digital content were produced on Earth during the test.

The new mark exceeded the sum of the entire throughput marks submitted in the present and previous years by other BWC entrants. The extraordinary achieved bandwidth was made possible in part through the use of the FAST TCP protocol developed by Caltech associate professor of computer science and electrical engineering Steven Low and his Netlab team.

The Bandwidth Challenge allowed the scientists and engineers involved to preview the globally distributed grid system that is now being developed in the United States and Europe in preparation for the next generation of high-energy physics experiments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC), scheduled to begin operation in 2007. Physicists at the LHC will search for the Higgs particles thought to be responsible for mass in the universe and for supersymmetry and other fundamentally new phenomena bearing on the nature of matter and space-time, in an energy range made accessible by the LHC for the first time.

While the SC2004 100+ Gbps demonstration required a major effort by the teams, their sponsors, and partnerships with major international research and education network organizations, it is expected that networking on this scale in support of the largest science projects (such as the LHC) will be commonplace within the next three to five years.
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