The Petascale DTN Project: High Performance Data Transfer for HPC Facilities

Abstract: The movement of large-scale (tens of Terabytes and larger) data sets between high performance computing (HPC) facilities is an important and increasingly critical capability. A growing number of scientific collaborations rely on HPC facilities for tasks which either require large-scale data sets as input or produce large-scale data sets as output. In order to enable the transfer of these data sets as needed by the scientific community, HPC facilities must design and deploy the appropriate data transfer capabilities to allow users to do data placement at scale. This paper describes the Petascale DTN Project, an effort undertaken by four HPC facilities, which succeeded in achieving routine data transfer rates of over 1PB/week between the facilities. We describe the design and configuration of the Data Transfer Node (DTN) clusters used for large-scale data transfers at these facilities, the software tools used, and the performance tuning that enabled this capability.