GÉANT NREN Survey results

Q1. Which (research) communities are you aware of that are moving large volumes of data across your network? 

(Answered: 21 Skipped: 9)

• Filesender service is supported in most NRENs
• AENEAS project (https://www.aeneas2020.eu/)
• Federated European Science Data Center (ESDC) to support the astronomical community in achieving the scientific goals of the Square
• Kilometer Array (SKA)
• Process (https://www.process-project.eu/)
• Creating data applications for collaborative research (Exascale learning on medical image data, SKA/LOFAR, Ancillary pricing for airline revenue management, Agricultural Analysis based on Copernicus data)
• Fiona Pacific data exchange PRP (https://prp.ucsd.edu/); Petascale DTN Project
• Effort to improve data transfer performance between the DOE ASCR HPC facilities at ANL, LBNL, ORNL, NCSA  4.4TB of cosmology simulation data

Q2. Are there any success stories regarding data transfer that you can report? What difficulties have you experienced?

(Answered: 17 Skipped: 13)

Most NRENs are doing small scale research projects regarding DTN deployment:

• Success stories (1): OFAR, E-VLBI and HEP (NIKHEF); For LOFAR, the input rate is 250 Gbit/s, of which about 80 Gbit/s are international - Surfnet
  • E-VLBI experiments are supported with 30 Gbit/s to JIVE and for HEP 100 Gbit/s is provisioned to NIKHEF.
• Success stories (2): Fast data transfer for Cancer research - IUCC (article link)

• Success stories (3): Moving ESA traffic from peering with Deutsche Telecom to DFN/Geant-Path - ACOnet

• Success stories (4): 100Gbit/s data transfer between Imperial College using Globus Connect endpoint - Janet

• Success stories (5): LCHONE, LOFAR, HLC data transfer transfer data trails by 5 NRENs

The major difficulties:

• Connecting the computers and internal lab network to the NREN infrastructure

• Tuning of network parameters in the campus/LAN

• Not using Science DMZ concept

Q3. What problems do your communities report to you around data transfers?

(Answered: 19 Skipped: 11)

• Performance and NOC issues
• Firewall problems, DMZ
• Local Campus issues (last mile)

Q4. Which tools or methods do you use to measure the data transfers and the data rates or the performance that can be achieved?

(Answered: 21 Skipped: 9)

Q5. What services do you provide to your users to help them move data across your network?

(Answered: 20 Skipped: 10)

Q6. Do you provide any other forms of assistance to your users to help them achieve optimal data transfers across your network?

(Answered: 17 Skipped: 13)

• Other: Globus online

Q7. Do you collaborate on large scale data transfers with international organisations and NRENs? If so, with whom and in what way?

(Answered: 17 Skipped: 13)

• The NRENS who collaborate with international organisations work on projects: WLGC, LHCONE, PRACE, HEP

Q.8. Would you be willing to work with us (GN4-3 WP6) on improving data transfer infrastructures for the community?

(Answered: 19 Skipped: 11)

Q.9. Additional comments related to data transfer that you could not express in the previous questions

(Answered: 4 Skipped: 26)

• DTNs needs standardization of inter domain protocols. More experimenting internationally is needed.
• The use of DTN and DMZ is not considered a solution for large data transfer in an environment in which capacity is lower than 100Gb for the end user access. In case capacity is not restricted, a set of tools is already available.
• Usually the bottleneck is in users’ local network premises and in users’ applications.
• Note also that some data cannot be moved from certified sites (biomedical).
• As a general comment, the concept of high rate data transfer between nodes needs more dissemination and explanation (end node tuning, long fat pipes, etc).
• We would like to know the best practices so that we follow them, so would like to know the results of this GN4 WP6 workgroup.