Case Study: University of Victoria accelerates high‑energy physics research and 100 Gbps data sharing with SanDisk Fusion ioMemory

Sandisk Helps Accelerate High Energy Physics Research For The Origin Of The Universe

SanDisk worked with the University of Michigan and the University of Victoria to address a critical bottleneck in Large Hadron Collider (LHC) research: moving and accessing tens to hundreds of petabytes of experimental data among CERN and roughly 100 computing centers worldwide. Upgrading many sites to full 100 Gbps networks was costly and complex, so the teams needed a simpler, low‑footprint transfer architecture that could cache, synchronize and deliver large datasets quickly for distributed physics analysis.

The teams deployed SanDisk Fusion ioMemory PCIe/NAND solutions in a single‑server architecture that replaced multi‑server configurations, cutting cost, complexity and failure points. Tested at SC14, the setup delivered exceptional performance—up to 137 Gbps read-to-disk and 113 Gbps write-to-disk locally, with sustained 99.7 Gbps network throughput between sites and sub-100 ms cross-site latency—demonstrating a practical path to 100G production WAN transfers and faster time-to-discovery for LHC researchers.

University of Victoria

Randall Sobie

Institute of Particle Physics Research Scientist and Professor