UIC's National Center for Data Mining (NCDM) and Laboratory for Advanced Computing sent astronomy data from Chicago to Amsterdam last week at 6.8 gigabits per second -- 6,800 times faster than the one-megabit per second speed used by most companies to connect to the Internet.

Tower of Terabytes

During a 30-minute test that used Amsterdam's SURFnet and Chicago's Abilene networks, researchers transmitted approximately 1.4 terabytes of data.

On paper, this massive amount of data would fill two buildings the size of the Sears Tower.

Using today's standard Internet protocol, the same data transfer would have taken 25 days, because over long distances, the common TCP network protocol is ineffective at moving large data sets.

Transatlantic Transfer

The towering transatlantic transfer used a newer network protocol developed by the NCDM called "UDP-based Data Transport," or UDT.

"We just finished our initial testing and analysis of the UDT protocol and found that with it, you can transfer large data sets over very busy international production networks safely," said Cees de Laat, an information technology professor at the University of Amsterdam who visited UIC for the demonstration. "This remarkable achievement with the UDT protocol paves the way for trans-Atlantic data-intensive applications," added de Laat, who specializes in grid computing and high-speed networking.

Unlike some other protocols now being studied for high-speed data transfer, UDP-based protocols can be used over today's Internet without making changes to the network infrastructure . The UIC demonstration showed that UDT may effectively coexist with thousands of other network connections.

Previous high-speed transfers of very large data sets used specialized research networks with data protocols that prevented other network traffic from sharing the same link.

The Un-Protocols

Researchers at UIC and elsewhere recently have developed hybrid protocols based on UDP to improve its reliability and minimize data lost during high-speed transmission.

"Using UDT, it is now practical to move even very large data sets over very long distances," Robert Grossman, director of UIC's National Center for Data Mining, told NewsFactor.

The demonstration was part of an ongoing international effort to find and test new ways of reliably moving massive data sets around the globe using advanced networks and new transfer protocols.

Such systems hold enormous promise for advancing scientific research, in addition to many possible commercial applications, Grossman added.