In addition to the Open Cloud Consortium (OCC), the research team included the Laboratory for Advanced Computing at the University of Illinois at Chicago, the International Center for Advanced Internet Research (iCAIR) at Northwestern University, and the Naval Research Laboratory.

The team demonstrated three applications, each showing how data intensive applications could span geographically distributed data centers given the appropriate hardware and software infrastructure. The demonstration used four data centers located in Chicago, Baltimore and San Diego and connected by wide area 10 Gbps networks provided through a partnership with the National Lambda Rail and Cisco Systems, Inc.

The first application used the OCC’s Open Cloud Testbed to process very large datasets over 256 servers in 4 data centers connected by wide area high performance networks. Data was exchanged at over 100Gb/s among the participating nodes. This application used a new version (version 1.24) of the open source software Sector/Sphere large data cloud, which was developed by Laboratory for Advanced Computing.

A protocol called UDT that was developed by the Laboratory for Advanced Computing is used by Sector/Sphere to achieve high performance, even over clouds that are distributed.

“With the Sector/Sphere technology demonstrated at the SC 09 Bandwidth Challenge, new classes of large data cloud applications are now practical,” according to Robert Grossman, who is the Director of the Laboratory for Advanced Computing and Managing Partner of Open Data Group.

The second application was an image rendering application developed by the Naval Research Laboratory that delivered very high resolution visualization (computed by remote cloud systems) over wide area Infiniband and IPv6. A hardware implementation of UDT was deployed to support the wide area Infiniband protocol.

The third application used a new protocol called that UDX that is a lightweight variant of the UDT protocol. UDX was able to sustain a data transfer rate of 9.2 Gb/s over a 10 Gb/s connection with a 200ms RTT (which corresponds to a 12,000 mile path or long enough to reach half way around the world).

In addition to the Open Cloud Consortium applications being selected as the overall winner of the SC 09 Bandwidth Challenge, a team led by Caltech and the University of Tokyo received SC09 Bandwidth Challenge Awards.