News

Apr. 15, 2011: Sector 2.6 Released! Sector 2.6 is released 6 months after 2,5. Version 2.6 siginificantly improves the code quality and software reliability. In addition, we have added more usability features so it is much easier now to manage and use the system in real world settings. In the meantime, we also identified a list of features that we will gradually introduce in the near future. The current architecture has been updated to easily accept new algorithms for each module.

Mar. 29, 2011: 147TB Scientific Data Delivered using Sector A group of astronomers recently moved 147TB data within 10 days from Knoxville TN to Baltimore, MD using a Sector system installed in Chicago IL (no direct link between Knoxville and Baltimore). The data is uploaded to Sector from the source in parallel, while it is downloaded in parallel in the mean time. Sector provides a file system interface for both sides to conviniently handle the data files, in addition to the awsome performance!

Sep. 30, 2010: Sector 2.5 Released! Sector release 2.5 is the most recent version with significant improvement to the code quality and reliability. We have beeb working closely with several users to make sure that the system run properly in production environments. Our users now run Sector across several data centers to support their large data storage and sharing at daily basis. Of course, the release would not be made without our contributors!

Sept. 07, 2010: Sector paper is on the top download list! Sector and Sphere: the design and implementation of a high-performance data cloud, a paper given by Yunhong Gu and Robert Grossman at the 2008 UK e-science All Hands meeting has been one of the top articles downloaded from the 'Philosophical Transaction of the Royal Society A 2009' website. Click here for more details and here for the paper.

June 10, 2010: Using Sector/Sphere for graph analysis We have successfully used Sector/Sphere to effectively perform a set of graph analysis jobs, including breadth-first search and enumerating cliques. These are the core algorithms for many applications involved with graph data structure, such as social network analysis. We have posted part of the results in the benchmark section.

Feb. 11, 2010: Sector 2.0 Release! We have reached a major milestone with the release of version 2.0. Version 2 reorganized the software code structure so that it is easier to deploy and expand (e.g., different security and metadata management modules can be supported). We also included several new features to improve performance, including support of in-memory objects.

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