Kingston and Liqid Working With Caltech

Kingston Digital, Inc., the flash memory affiliate of Kingston Technology company, Inc. recognizes its ongoing relationship with the Caltech team working on experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), to facilitate their collaborative research efforts in high energy physics.

Behind the discoveries at the LHC such as the Higgs boson particle, are massive sets of data that need to be distributed, shared and analyzed at unprecedented rates. These data sets are used by a network of several thousand researchers, scientists and engineers across laboratories and universities to calibrate the equipment and prepare physics experiments. When scientists analyze the data, they typically look at a few billion events at a time, and deal with data sets that range from a few to about 50TB in size, drawn from multi-petabyte data stores. Kingston sees its advances in NVMe SSD technology, jointly developed with Liqid Inc., as being able to saturate the major network links interconnecting research facilities, typically in the range of 100Gb/s per link, when used together with the Caltech team’s high throughput applications which were highlighted at the Caltech exhibit at SC16.

“In 1998 we first tackled the problem of how institutions collaborating in the Large Hadron Collider physics program – and in particular my high energy physics experiment called the Compact Muon Solenoid – would handle the problem of going from the masses of data that we acquire, process, analyze and distribute to getting the physics results and making physics discoveries,” said Harvey Newman, professor of physics, Caltech. “Among roughly 170 sites, the amount of data under management by the LHC experiments combined is now about 400PB. And talking in terms of the data transported across networks, it was nearly an EB in the last 12 months.“

The Caltech team, which originated the worldwide grid concept supporting the LHC program and is the leading science team in terms of developing high throughput applications for data transfer over WANs, also focuses on using GPUs in conjunction with machine learning to process scientific data sets.

Working with its technology partner 2CRSI Corporation, Caltech identified the forthcoming Liqid Powered Kingston DCP1000 as a candidate to deliver high IO/s for local computation as well as high throughput for data transfers. The Caltech team led by professor Newman demonstrated delivering 100Gb/s data rates between storage systems using only two NVMe add-in cards in a single 1U 2CRSI rack server and scaling linearly to drive 200Gb/s of data using four NVMe add-in cards.

“Organizations like Caltech validate the ongoing need for next-generation storage solutions,” said Alain Wilmouth, CEO, 2CRSI. “As a technology aggregator, we are very pleased that Kingston delivered an NVMe form factor that meets the requirements for a compact, high performance solution.“

“Caltech is continuously pushing the envelope, and through this collaboration we see the ongoing need for advances in next-generation storage solutions,” said Ariel Perez, SSD business manager, Kingston. “Our partnership with Liqid allows us to continue delivering innovative, cost effective NVMe solutions to enable scientists to efficiently tackle their current and future research initiatives.“

100Gb/s and 200Gb/s solutions featuring Liqid Powered Kingston NVMe drives and the solutions from 2CRSI were displayed at Supercomputing 2016 (SC16) in Salt Lake City, UT.