OREANDA-NEWS. 50 Gigabytes of data per second across vast distances: A collaboration of industry and research co-managed by T-Systems and Alcatel-Lucent, Introduced at this year's International Supercomputing Conference in Leipzig a collaboration of industry and research co-managed by T-Systems and Alcatel-Lucent showed the way ahead. Optical data transmission at top performance levels, combined with high-speed flash memory technologies and a distributed high-performance file system, allow applications to communicate with one another using a 400 Gbit/s data path in a world premiere. The demonstration proves that data-intensive projects can be distributed and processed effectively even over great distances. It also opens up new opportunities for data security in the event of a disaster.

Developments such as cloud computing, social media and big data are driving the expansion in worldwide data traffic. According to forecasts, the core Internet infrastructure will have to deal with data volumes in 2015 that are ten times higher than in 2010. In turn, this demands more powerful data networks. In the project, high-performance connections are used to exchange data between Dresden, Munich and Hamburg for two computing-intensive tasks involving distributed databases and multi-step data processing in the area of climate research and turbine development. With this approach, close cooperation between distant data centers is being tested under real conditions, along with new potential applications for large bandwidths. The progress achieved to date represents a major milestone for future-proof data networks.

The project participants are Alcatel-Lucent, Barracuda Networks, Bull, Clustervision, German Aerospace Center (DLR), EMC, IBM, Leibniz Supercomputing Centre, Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, Mellanox, Garching Computing Center of the Max Planck Society, Telekom Innovation Laboratories, T-Systems, Center for Information Services and High Performance Computing at TU Dresden.