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Matthew Dublin is a senior writer at Genome Technology. |
BGI's Genome Superhighway
June 29, 2012
BGI announced today the successful transfer of roughly 24 gigabytes of genomic data from Beijing to UC Davis in under 30 seconds using a link that connects US and Chinese research networks.
The transfer demonstration actually took place on June 22 during an event in Beijing celebrating a new 10 Gigabit US-China network connection supported by Internet2, an advanced networking consortium led by the US research community that is focused on developing multi-terabit networking pipeline for researchers across the globe.
That same 24 gigabyte file sent over the public Internet would take over 26 hours from upload to completed transfer.
"The 10 Gigabit network connection is even faster than transferring data to most local hard drives," says Dawei Lin, director of the bioinformatics core at the UC Davis Genome Center. "The use of a 10 Gigabit network connection will be groundbreaking, very much like email replacing hand delivered mail for communication. It will enable scientists in the genomics-related fields to communicate and transfer data more rapidly and conveniently, and bring the best minds together to better explore the mysteries of life science."
