As part of the SCinet Research Sandbox at the Supercomputing 2011 conference, Indiana University (IU) demonstrated use of the Lustre high performance parallel file system over a dedicated 100 Gbps wide area network (WAN) spanning more than 3,500 km (2,175 mi). This demonstration functioned as a proof of concept and provided an opportunity to study Lustre's performance over a 100 Gbps WAN. To characterize the performance of the network and file system, low level iperf network tests, file system tests with the IOR benchmark, and a suite of real-world applications reading and writing to the file system were run over a latency of 50.5 ms. In this article we describe the configuration and constraints of the demonstration and outline key findings.

Indiana University provides powerful compute, storage, and network resources to a diverse local and national research community every day. IU's facilities have been used to support data-intensive applications ranging from digital humanities to computational biology.For this year's bandwidth challenge, several IU researchers will conduct experiments from the exhibit floor utilizing the resources that University Information Technology Services currently provides.Using IU's newly constructed 535 TB Data Capacitor and an additional component installed on the exhibit floor, we will use Lustre across the wide area network to simultaneously facilitate dynamic weather modeling, protein analysis, instrument data capture, and the production, storage, and analysis of simulation data.