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SupercomputingAsia 2022 Conference Announces Winners of the Data Mover Challenge 2021

March 2, 2022

Singapore, March 2, 2022 — The winning teams from Asia, Australia and the U.S. were announced at the SCA22 awards ceremony for the international Data Mover Challenge 2021 (DMC21) competition.

Moving data is an essential foundation of national and global science. The international Data Mover Challenge (DMC) is a competition organized by the National Supercomputing Centre (NSCC) Singapore that aims to bring together experts from industry and academia in a bid to test their software and solutions for transferring huge amounts of research data. The DMC competition encourages international teams to come up with the most advanced and innovative solutions for data transfer across servers located in Singapore, Australia, Canada, Europe, USA, South Korea, Japan and Saudi Arabia that are connected by 100Gbps international research and education networks.

A/Prof Tan Tin Wee, Chief Executive, National Supercomputing Centre (NSCC) Singapore & Co-Chair of the SCA22 Steering Committee (left), presenting the award for “Best Long-Distance Performance AND Overall Winner” to a representative from Team Ciena-iCAIR-UETN (right) at the SCA22 Conference in Singapore.

Seven international teams from Singapore, Japan, Poland, Australia, Malaysia, USA and Germany participated in the DMC21 competition. The challenge focused on optimizing point-to-point data transfers between sites – a crucial step forward in advancing research collaboration and sharing. Teams competed by deploying the best software tools on Data Transfer Nodes (DTNs) that were set up within existing international networks across the globe.

After three grueling months of development and deployment of software, the panel of international judges conducted extensive deliberations and reviews and the results of the DMC21 were announced at the SupercomputingAsia 2022 (SCA22) hybrid conference. Winners were invited to present their winning solutions live at SCA22.

“The DMC judging committee was presented with an interesting range of participants who each had a unique approach to the challenge. The winning solutions covered the spectrum of network technology and the quality of the entries were highly regarded by the judging panel, with each presenting its own merits in various use cases,” said Mr Andrew Howard, Associate Director of Cloud Services at the National Computational Infrastructure (NCI) Australia, and Chief Judge of the DMC21 Judging Committee.

Commenting on the uniqueness of each team’s winning solutions, Mr Howard said, “Team MUSASHINO created a new internet protocol which was able to deliver a reliable data transfer service over a range of network conditions like loss and congestion while two other teams, Arcitecta and Globus, focused on using the network efficiently. Arcitecta optimized for large reliable dataset replication within an existing data management framework while Globus utilized a well-established data transfer ecosystem and applied it to the DMC context. Team Fast is Good focused on delivering large data sets through firewalls and impaired networks efficiently. Team Ciena-iCAIR-UETN produced a highly optimized framework which was able to programmatically define a data transfer with the ability to employ machine learning to optimize the paths, network configurations, protocols and throughput presented through a Jupyter interface. It was also able to integrate with existing Jupyter workflows.”

“The judging committee would like to thank the teams who participated and our partners across the global HPC and NREN community who kindly provided their expertise, resources and capabilities and their ongoing support through the challenge,” continued Mr Howard.

Congratulations to all the winning DMC 21 teams!

  • Team MUSASHINO (Japan) Most Innovative and Best IPv6 Performance
  • Arcitecta (Australia)  Most Complete Solution and Best Software Architecture
  • Fast Is Good – Raysync (Malaysia/China) Best Virtualization Support 
  • Globus (USA) Best Integrated Software Experience
  • Ciena-iCAIR-UETN (Canada/USA) Best Long-Distance PerformanceAND Overall Winner

DMC2021 Topology

For more information about the Data Mover Challenge 2021 (DMC21), the participants and the supporting partners, please visit https://www.nscc.sg/data-mover-challenge-2021.