May 2013 User of the Month: Vadim Roytershteyn
May 06, 2013 | Raj Kettimuthu
It is my pleasure to announce that we have selected Vadim Roytershteyn as the user of the month for May 2013.
Vadim is a plasma physicist at SciberQuest, Inc., where he uses large-scale simulations to study a variety of processes in laboratory, space, and astrophysical plasmas. He primarily works with so-called fully kinetic simulations, which use computational particles to represent plasma species (such as electrons and ions). Such simulations are very attractive because they provide essentially first-principle description of plasma under fairly general conditions. At the same time, fully kinetic simulations generate a very large amount of data, which can be challenging to deal with.
Since he started using Globus Online, Vadim has moved 1.67 PB of data—including 1.15 PB in the month of April alone. The data that he moved last month mostly comes from simulations performed on Blue Waters, one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world. Blue Waters, located at the National Center for Supercomputing (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, uses Globus Online to move data to the storage system, HPSS—which is how Vadim was using Globus Online last month. “The Globus Online system and transfers work very well,” Vadim says. “It allows high speed transfers to be conducted fully automatically, without the need to constantly monitor progress. Practically the only thing I have to worry about is refreshing my credentials from time to time.”
In one instance, Vadim moved a 500 TB dataset in 8 days at an average rate of 5.6 Gbps, and in another instance he moved a 39 TB dataset in 13 hours at an average rate of 6.5 Gbps. Most of his transfer jobs ran into some transient failures, but Globus Online's retry mechanism helped recover automatically.
Congratulation Vadim, and thanks for using Globus Online!