Johns Hopkins/U of Illinois at Chicago win Bandwidth Bowl

Johns Hopkins University and the University of Illinois at Chicago’s National Center for Data Mining joined forces to win the recent Bandwidth Challenge, during which they zipped 2,000 CDs worth of data (1.3TB) across 1,000-plus miles in 20 minutes. The data went from Chicago to Tampa, the site of a recent supercomputing event. The team sustained a data rate of 8GB per second over a 10GB per second link. One member of the team said that the only way to send such an amount of data so fast a few years ago would have been by literally shipping computers to destination locations. The schools said that being able to send massive amounts of data at high speeds across long distances is key to enabling research in areas such as astronomy. More here.