08 December 2010

So who's winning the transfer rate race for the Tier2 sites in the UK

Well its not really a race but I thought it would be interested to see how the rates to and from the Tier2 with RAL.
So the clear winner is ( and probably always going to be) RALPPD. This should seem obvious since they are co-located so various factors (small rtt, large bandwidth link for examples;) which would lead to a high rates. This lead to the rate plot as shown below:

Here you can see the rate has got to over 250MB/s
A close second I thought was going to be Glasgow, (they have a longer rtt and lower bandwidth pipe so you would expect them to fair worse) :



This shows that they have got to 140MB/s
Sometimes it is unfair to compare these numbers since the number of concurrent transfers on the FTS channels varies,. Glasgow actually have more concurrent transfers ( ~140MB/s with 42 concurrent transfers compare to ~250MB/s with fewer concurrent transfers.) It is because Glasgow had the most concurrent transfers that I thought it would have the highest rates:
But the peak rates I see for the sites appears to be the following (in the last month at least). If a site thinks they have seen better rates then comment on this Post!!!
( rtt time between SEs is shown in brackets after each record. Well its actually the rtt to the closest router that traceroute can resolve.)

RALPP 250 MB/s ( .2ms)
Imperial 250 MB/s (5.0ms)
Manchester 200MB/s (8.0ms)
Glasgow 140Mb/s (10.9ms)
Lancaster 100MB/s (6.4ms)
QMUL 100MB/s (5.7ms)
Birmingham 90MB/s (8.8ms)
Brunel 90MB/s (6.4ms)
Oxford 90MB/s (8.9ms)
Sheffiled 80Mb/s (9.1ms)
Liverpool 75MB/s (9.3ms)
RHUL 40MB/s (8.2ms)
Cambridge 30MB/s (10.3ms)
ECDF 20MB/s (12.9ms)
Bristol 17MB/s (4.0ms)
UCL 15MB/s (7.3ms)
Durham 12 MB/s (14.8ms)


For some sites the limiting factor seems to be the link (ie transfers are running at line speed.) For other sites the limiting factor is the number of concurrent transfers currently set in FTS. Some thing to tweak further....( Something really interesting is that the top two sites are the only dCache we have, but this could just be coincidence since they are also the shortest and close to second shortest rtt times of any site.

ATLAS have also started their sonar T2-T2 mesh of testing inter cloud T2 transfers. this made me think of the work I had done (but not reported) about work I had done in looking in splitting STAR-T2 channels at RAL into a slow medium and fast channels. the rough split is western European sites in fast channel, north America in the medium channel and south America/Asia-pacific in slow channel ( going from rtt time) . This would be an initial split and then some tweaking if some sites were slower than their rtt would suggest.
Interesting to see if ATLAS list of slow transfers for UK sites match mine.
my list of slow sites would be:

Australia-ATLAS
BEIJING-LCG2
CBPF
EELA-UTFSM
LCG_KNU
MA-01-CNRST
NCP-LCG2
SDU-LCG2
TOKYO-LCG2
UNIANDES
TW-FTT
TR-10-ULAKBIM
INDIACMS-TIFR


Medium sites ( North America)would be:
Canadian
CA-ALBERTA-WESTGRID-T2
CA-SCINET-T2
CA-VICTORIA-WESTGRID-T2
SFU-LCG2
VICTORIA-LCG2

American
UST3
BUATLAS
UMICH
IUT
UTA
OU
UIUC
UCTP
STU
UCT2
SMU
AGLT2
WIS
UMFS
SWT2UTA
SWT2CPN

Plus I am working with Glasgow to see how much of their 6Gbps can be used; but more on that in my next post.

No comments: