Scaling the Earth System Grid to 100Gbps Networks
Mehmet Balman, Alex Sim · 2012
The SC11 demonstration, titled Scaling the Earth System Grid to 100Gbps Networks, showed the ability to use underlying infrastructure for the movement of climate data over 100Gbps network. Climate change research is one of the critical data intensive sciences, and the amount of data is continuously growing. Climate simulation data is geographically distributed over the world, and it needs to be accessed from many sources for fast and efficient analysis and inter-comparison of simulations. We used a 100Gbps link connecting National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) and Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). In the demo, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) phase 3 of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP-3) dataset was staged into the memory of computing nodes at ANL and ORNL from NERSC over the 100Gbps network for analysis and visualization. In general, climate simulation data consists of relatively small and large files with irregular file size distribution in each dataset. In this demo, we addressed challenges on data management in terms of high bandwidth networks, usability of existing protocols and middleware tools, and how applications can adapt and benefit from next generation networks.