Pile of Dross

Yay, success. Overnight we were accepting data from CERN at a rate of 150MB/s. This is an important number because its the nominal rate we’ll have to accept data at when the LHC switches on, though spot data rates my be higher – up to 600MB/s has been estimated. Also, this is really the first time we’ve seen sustained rates of over 1Gb/s on the optical private network we have to CERN, despite it being provisioned at 2Gb/s.

Another impressive feat is that last week we had 12 sites accepting data at 800-1000MB/s cumulatively, yesterday and today with the number of sites trimmed down to 6, those sites (us included), were getting close to accepting data at 800MB/s. A far cry from the summer when with 12 sites it was hard to sustain 600MB/s.

The atmosphere’s different here too, in the summer it was desperate, we were swamped with software problems and hardware glitches, this time its subtly different – we’re still seeing some hardware glitches and some software behaviour we don’t understand, but they’re puzzles to ponder, not horrendous obstacles to overcome, that doesn’t mean I haven’t spent times trying to raise network rates by thought alone, by peering intently at the network graphs – just that it seemed to work this time :-D.

Trackback This Post | Subscribe to the comments through RSS Feed