Using a 5,000-mile network loop operated by ESnet, researchers at the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory (SLAC) recently transferred 1 petabyte in 29 hours, with encryption and checksumming, beating last year's record by 5 hours, an almost 15 percent improvement.

As members of the lab’s Computer Science Division, they develop the tools needed to handle ginormous data volumes produced by the next generation of scientific discovery machines.

Liu acknowledged for wide-ranging work in energy materials, catalysis, carbon sequestration, material in extreme conditions and scientific big data mining.

SLAC has led the development and implementation of a variety of upgrades to the ATLAS experiment to match the increased discovery potential of an LHC now operating at record proton collision energies.