Gigabit uplinks don't cut it for Research

Author: I. Gable

It has been clear for some time that a 1GE uplink doesn’t cut it for organizations doing data driven research; not even for desktop scale data. I recently upgraded to a new MacBook with a Solid State PCIe storage device. I hooked both laptops to my office Gigabit wall ports and used rsync to start copying the files on the to the new machine. My older laptop is mid-2010 generation 15” MacBook Pro with 500 GB 7200 RPM Seagate drive. Even copying from this extremely modest hardware I was able to move data onto my new MacBook at around 350 Mb/s as shown in the Cacti network plot below. We have now arrived at the time where researchers with their portable electronics can saturate your Gigabit uplink.

Cacti plot showing basic rsync between two MacBooks with the default the interface configuration and office wall ports to a GE switch

Why is this interesting noteworthy? Today, any old junk has the capacity to read at a significant fraction of a gigabit (including 3 year old laptop hard drives) and commonly available SSD systems can easily handle the write. Any researching walking around with the laptop can chew up your Gigabit site uplink. The age of being able to say “gigabit is enough for us” is over if you have more then a half dozen people doing science with data at your site.

I’ve included some picture and specs of the setup so that no one thinks I’m doing something special.

The left laptop is a mid-2010 generation MacBook Pro and the right laptop is late-2013 Macbook Pro