Physicists at the California Institute of Technology have set a new record for data network data transfer speeds. The international team of high-energy physicists, computer scientists and network engineers achieved a rate of 339 gigabits per second (Gbps), which is equivalent to four million gigabytes per day, roughly doubling last year’s record.

The scientists presented their findings at the Supercomputing SC12 conference last week, in Salt Lake City, Utah. The team also set a new record for two-way transfer on a single link by sending data at 187 Gbps between Victoria, Canada, and Salt Lake City. These achievements are supposed to pave the way for the next level of data-intensive science, in high-energy physics, astrophysics, genomics, meteorology, and global climate tracking.

The Higgs boson discovery was made possible by a global network of computational and data-storage facilities that transferred more than 100 petabytes of data in the past year. As the energy levels at the LHC continue to increase, the experiments will produce even larger amounts of data, reaching the exabyte range, a billion gigabytes.

Next year’s tests will use network and data-storage technologies that are just beginning to emerge, and could reach the 1 terabit-per-second (a thousand Gbps) data transfers over long-range networks by next fall.

[via Caltech News]