If you have ever had to wait those agonizing minutes in front of a computer for a movie or large file to load, you’ll likely sympathize with the plight of cosmologists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory. But instead of watching TV dramas, they are trying to transfer, as fast and as accurately as possible, the huge amounts of data that make up movies of the universe – computationally demanding and highly intricate simulations of how our cosmos evolved after the Big Seed.
In a new approach to enable scientific breakthroughs, researchers linked together supercomputers at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF) and at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UI). This link enabled scientists to transfer massive amounts of data and to run two different types of demanding computations in a coordinated fashion – referred to technically as a workflow.
