InfiniBand goes the distance Researchers at the Energy
Department's Oak Ridge National Laboratory have shown that
InfiniBand can be used to transport large datasets via a
dedicated network thousands of miles in length with a throughput
unmatched by high-speed TCP/IP connections. In a test setup,
researchers were able to achieve an average throughput of 7.34
gigabits/sec between two machines at each end of the 8,600-mile
optical link. In contrast, the throughout of such traffic using
a tweaked high-throughput version of TCP, called Hyper Text
Caching Protocol (HTCP), was 1.79 gigabits/sec at best. Oak
Ridge researcher Nageswara Rao presented a paper on the group's
work, "Wide-Area Performance Profiling of 10GigE and InfiniBand
Technologies," at the SC08 conference last month. Increasingly,
DOE labs are finding they need to move large files over long
distances. In the next few months, for instance, the European
Union's Large Hadron Collider will start operation, generating
petabytes of data that will cross the