A Canadian team has succeeded in transferring 1 TByte of data over a newly established “lightpath” extending 12,000 km from TRIUMF in Vancouver to CERN in Geneva in under 4 h – a new record rate of 700 Mbps on average. Peak rates of 1 Gbps were seen during the tests, which took place in conjunction with the iGRID 2002 conference held in Amsterdam in late September. The previous record for a transatlantic transfer was 400 Mbps.
The achievement is particularly notable because the data were transferred from “disk to disk”, making it a realistic representation of a practical data transfer. The data started on disk at TRIUMF and ended up on disk at CERN, where in principle they could be used for physics analysis. The data transferred were the result of Monte Carlo simulations of the ATLAS experiment, being constructed at CERN to take data at the Large Hadron Collider.
The transfer used a new technology for network data transfer, called a lightpath. Lightpaths establish a direct optical link between two remote computers, essentially positioning them in a “local-area network” that is anything but local. This avoids the need for more complicated arbitration (or routing) of the network traffic. The link used here to connect TRIUMF and CERN is the longest-known single-hop network.
