The project has established a historical first: for the first time over the newly built CAE-1 link, with a production setup at ICM end. It has shown that moving data at great speed and scale between Poland (and thus Central and Eastern Europe) and Singapore is a reality. Furthermore, although the project was initiated only in mid-October, all goals have been reached and a few new grounds have also been broken as well. On the ICM side only two technical experts were involved: Marcin Semeniuk, who configured the entire set-up on the Polish side and Jarosław Skomiał who was responsible for establishing a data link between Warsaw and Singapore. The idea for this production environment was proposed by the former director of ICM, Dr. Marek Michalewicz, who also coordinated this project with all international collaborators.

It is also a true international collaboration:

• ICM, aka Interdisciplinary Centre for Mathematical and Computational Modelling, University of Warsaw, Poland is one of the most established supercomputing centers in Eastern Europe;
• A*CRC , aka A*STAR Computational Resource Centre, is the Singapore government-funded source of HPC expertise;
• Zettar Inc. is a software startup based in Palo Alto, California, U.S. It is supported by its revenue and U.S. DOE Office of Science funding. It delivers a software application zx for moving data at speed and scale since 2016 and has been setting a world record annually ever since.

Furthermore, in the social, research and scientific collaboration, and engineering, the project has achieved many worthy accomplishments. We had the pleasure to present it during Expo 2020 Dubai. The webinar was shown at Poland Expo.

The project has shown concretely the following:

• More R&E regions are reachable. From now on, distributed data-intensive science and engineering collaboration between Europe, Middle East, Asia and Pacific regions are not only feasible, but also can be efficient if the right data moving solution is used.
• More world-wide participation in distributed data-intensive research collaboration is a reality. The achievement should encourage and motivate more parties along the data path and beyond to collaborate on the advancement of the global sciences and engineering.
• Date gravity is no longer a barrier to progress. Even with the tight time for preparation, the attained transfer speed already shows it’s possible to move 1PB in less than two days between any two points along the data path used by the project.

Engineering:

1. Modest hardware can produce world-class top results, if the resources are utilized intelligently.
2. This is a production trial – not a “for show demo”. For example, at ICM, two production Lustre file systems are employed; both formed with 20 OSTs; each OST has 4 x 7200RPM HDDs. Not even a single SSD is employed. Only a single DTN at each end. Both DTNs are from existing hardware inventory. Both DTNs are more than 2 years old.
3. Attained result is world’s top level (~60Gbps average)
4. Stock TCP is used. There is no need to use any proprietary protocol.
5. Vast distance: 19,800 km,12,375 miles
6. Stunningly short preparation: 2 weeks total
7. InfiniBand (IB), typically used for interconnect in the HPC space, is not amenable to interface bonding, unlike Ethernet, But the two storage pools with IB interconnects are aggregated by the data mover software Zettar zx.