Science DMZ Implemented at NERSC

In 2009, both NERSC and OLCF installed data transfer nodes (DTNs) to enable researchers who use their computing resources to move large data sets between each facility's mass storage systems. As a result, wide area network (WAN) transfers between NERSC and OLCF increased by at least a factor of 20 for many collaborations. As an example, a computational scientist in the OLCF Scientific Computing Group who was researching the fundamental nuclear properties of carbon-14, in collaboration with scientists from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and Iowa State University, had previously waited more than an entire workday for a single 33 GB input file to transfer---just one of 20 files of similar size that needed to be moved between the sites. With the improved infrastructure, those researchers were immediately able to improve their transfer rate to 200 MB/s enabling them to move all 40 TB of data between NERSC and OLCF in less than three days.