June 2012 User of the Month: Brian O'Shea

It is my pleasure to announce that Brian O'Shea from Michigan State University has been selected as the user of the month for June 2012. In the month of June, Brian moved more than 250TBs of data in less than 15 days - an average data rate of 1.6 Gbps with peaks as high as 2.5 Gbps!

Brian is an assistant professor at Michigan State University, with a joint appointment in the Lyman Briggs College and the Department of Physics and Astronomy. His research involves numerical simulations of cosmological structure formation, including Population III stars, galaxy clusters, and galactic chemical evolution. More information about his research is available here. Brian and his team used Enzo (enzo-project.org) to run a suite of eight cosmological simulations on the Blue Waters Early Science System with the goal of understanding how galaxies in the early Universe grow and evolve, in several statistically-dissimilar environments. Click here to view some of the movies that Brian's team has created. These movies are volume renderings of one of their cosmological calculations of a statistically average portion of the universe, and are shown approximately 300 million years after the Big Bang. Their simulations generated several hundred terabytes of data, which they had to move elsewhere as the Early Science System was only available temporarily. "This is why we needed Globus Online to transfer data back and forth." said Brian. "Globus was quite useful for transferring data. We reached sustained file transfer rates that varied from ~10 MB/s to 300 MB/s, with a mean value for all of our datasets of somewhere around 80 MB/s per transmitted dataset." Brian added. Congratulations, Brian and thanks for your continued support of Globus Online!