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Moving research data faster around the world
17 October, 2019

Moving research data faster around the world

AARNet engineers put new international network links to the test and achieve 49.8 Gigabits per second (Gbps) sustained throughput between Australia and Europe for research data transfers.

Research Network & Connectivity Data & Collaboration News

Impressive results were achieved recently during long distance performance testing with live research data transfers over the AARNet spectrum of the new Indigo subsea cable system connecting Sydney, Perth and Singapore, and over the new CAE-1 (Collaboration Asia Europe) link connecting Singapore to London.

This round of network performance testing involved:

  • Collaborating with engineers at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) to transfer 1000 x 4 GB high energy physics data files in parallel from the CERN storage infrastructure used for hosting data from Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiments, located in Geneva, to Sydney at 49.8 Gbps sustained throughput. This test was run using the LHC Open Network Environment (LHCONE) virtual private network running over the CAE-1 and Indigo cable systems between London and Sydney.
  • Collaborating with engineers at the National Supercomputing Centre of Singapore (NSCC) to transfer data between AARNet servers in Sydney and at the NSCC over the Indigo cable system between Sydney and Singapore at 70Gbps sustained throughput and with Iperf3 recording speeds great than 92Gbps.

AARNet engineers and their colleagues at scientific organisations, supercomputing facilities and research and education networks in Europe, Asia and the United States routinely run experiments and test networking technologies for managing large data flows. This is to ensure research network infrastructure meets the big data transfer needs of researchers and scientists collaborating globally in data-intensive fields, such as high energy physics, radio astronomy, climate science and genomics, now and into the future.

Testing and fine tuning the end-to-end performance of our international networks is vital for ensuring that researchers have the ‘friction-free’ connectivity they need to share and analyse data. This is a capability that enables scientific discovery.”

AARNet - Australia's Academic and Research Network
Chris Myers

AARNet Solutions Consultant, Network and Systems Architecture

AARNet networking infrastructure and services are helping researchers address some of the most pressing challenges of our time.

More information

If you’re a researcher needing help with research data transfers, contact your institutions' IT Team or you can contact us.

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