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Visualizing the Universe @100Gbps



LBL's ESnet group celebrated it's 25th anniversary at SC11 with the first public demonstration of the 100Gbps ANI testbed. Members of the LBL Visualization group worked closely with ESnet personnel to demonstrate a real-time streaming demo over the brand new 100Gbps link.

We utilized UDP streaming software originally developed under the Visapult framework. Using multiple UDP streams, we were able to demonstrate a peak bandwidth utilization of ~99Gbps on the link. We streamed over 150 timesteps of an astrophysics simulation output from NERSC to the LBL booth in Seattle. Each timestep consisted of 16GB of data, and was transmitted in ~1.4 seconds. Overall, 2.3TB of data was transmitted in ~3 minutes. Datasets were read from GPFS, staged into flash memory at NERSC and then split into jumbo-sized UDP packets. The packets were received and placed into distributed memory on 4 receiving nodes. Paraview software was then used on 32 CPU cores to volume render the image. We obtained a rendering performance of ~2.5 seconds/frame for the 1024x1024x1024 volume.

For comparison purposes, we transmitted a stream over a conventional 10Gbps network. In order to visually convey the effect of the reduced bandwidth, the 100Gbps and 10Gbps streams were provided with the same time budget to send data. The 10Gbps could only send a fraction of the data as highlighted in the Figure. The successful demo highlights the power of ESnet's 100Gbps ANI network. The network enables scientists to move massive datasets from large experimental facilities (such as the LHC) or supercomputing centers (such as NERSC) to their local analysis resources.

Acknowledgement

LBL Visualization/NERSC Analytics:
Yushu Yao, Prabhat, Burlen Loring, Hank Childs, Mark Howison, Wes Bethel and John Shalf.

ESnet:
Brian Tierney, Eric Pouyoul, Patrick Dorn, Evangelos Chaniotakis, Chin Guok, Chris Tracy and Lauren Rotman.

NERSC:
Jason Lee, Shane Canon, Tina Declerck and Cary Whitney.

Computational Cosmology:
Zarija Lukic and Peter Nugent.