News
Nov. 21, 2009: Sector featured in SC09 demos and BWC winning entry We have successfully presented and demonstrated Sector/Sphere at SC09. Sector/Sphere was used in one of our BWC demos to showcase the ability of distributing and processing large dataset across wide area networks. We won the SC09 BWC together with Caltech and University of Tokyo. If you are interested in more details about Sector/Sphere, please email gu # lac.uic.edu.
Sep. 24, 2009: Sector is one of the finalists of SC09 Disruptive Technologies "Generally speaking, a disruptive technology is a technological innovation or product that eventually overturns the existing dominant technology or product in the marketplace [SC09]." With Sector, we demonstrate the disruptive capacity to support large wide area data cloud. More to follow...
Sep. 20, 2009: Sorted 1TB data within 500 seconds on 120 servers Using Sector/Sphere version 1.24, we can now sort 1TB data (100-byte record with 10-byte key) within 500 seconds on 120 servers. The server node is $2,200 each, containing single Intel Xeon E5410 2.4GHz CPU, 16GB RAM, 4*1TB RAID0 disk, and 1Gb/s NIC. The 120 nodes are hosted on 4 racks and the inter-rack bandwidth is 20Gb/s. See the detailed benchmark results here.
Sep. 14, 2009: Sector version 1.24 Released!Version 1.24 includes support for multiple active-active master servers and Sphere Streaming. Like Hadoop Streaming, Sphere Streaming allows users to run applications (including system commands) directly on Setcor files. The applications can be written in any programming languages. In addition, we have changed to BSD license to give users maximum flexibility in using Sector/Sphere.
June 20, 2009: Sector Public Cloud We have set up a Sector Public Cloud over high speed wide area research networks. Researchers who have high speed connection to our testbed (e.g., Internet2) can use this public cloud to share big data. Data transfer speed can be up to 10Gb/s to your institution. Please follow this link to set up the client.
April 22, 2009: Sector version 1.21 release Sector 1.21 release! Version 1.21 supports persistent data channel between slaves and clients, thus reduce the data connection set up time. We also added FUSE file system interface to Sector, so that you can mount Sector as a local file system directory. Finally, version 1.21 includes many bug fixes since version 1.20.
Feb. 13 - 15, 2009: Sector Demo at AAAS Annual Conference NCDM demonstrated Sector/Sphere during the AAAS annual meeting in Chicago. News Release #1, #2.
Nov. 21 , 2008: SC08 Bandwidtn Challenge Winner Sector/ Sphere won Bandwidth Challenge awarad during the supercomputing conference in Austin, TX. We demonstrated using Sector/Sphere to run Cistrack (a bioinformatics project), CreditStone, and TeraSort. News Release