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Network Testbed Emulab.net
gseidman writes: "Have you ever needed to simulate a network? Tired of old ns? Do you just hate dealing with hardware in general? Take a peek at Utah's Emulab.Net. They have over 300 PCs, some StrongARM devices, roughly 5 miles of cabling, a huge and expensive switch, and great software for setting up a virtual LAN. They also have a gallery showing the machine room in various stages of completion (did I mention five miles of cabling?)."
It's already starting to slow down. Now would be a good chance to start dedicating some of those machines as backup web servers, eh?
What's your damage, Heather?
What is it with the modern generation who think that simulations will improve their likely performance? It is all idiocy, when I was young we did things with a spanner and looked at das blinkenlights under real world conditions. This is so much nonsense, really, the sort of thing I'd expect to come out of our modern CS courses.
Computing is just an offshoot of down-and-dirty engineering, and none of us should forget it. The day we forget the feel of the netowrk cards in our hands, the smell of the overheating cat5, is the day we lose control over the netowkrks of America, the day that our economy starts going backwards.
I don't know what brainchild designed the layout of those switches, but the fact that they went for the RJ-48 blades versus the Telco (RJ21X) blades in those switches shows sloppy planning. What if one of the blades in the middle goes out? They have to unplug 48 Cat-5 cables versus unscrewing 4 telco harmonicas and leaving the 48 ports untouched on a patch panel
If you're going to put forth that kind of effort and money, why not do it right the first time?
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
I was one of the few 'lucky' people who had to run it, and no, we didn't run it thorough a 2ft high crawl space. It is even worse than that.
In case you couldn't tell from the pics, this is all in self contained racks. The large majority of the wiring is in 9 standard-sized racks, or about 7ft tall * 3ft deep * 2 ft wide * 9 racks = 378 cubic feet for about 5 miles (25,000 ft) of cable plus all the PCs and switches.
As a generous estimate, that leaves 100 cubic feet for cables and ventilation. That says the every cubic foot of open space is filled with an average of 250 linear feet.
Needless to say, it was not fun.
Mac
Does the name Pavlov ring a bell?
Basic research is fine, but I wish that the money poured into it would go towards immediate business applications.
Now that's just silly. Basic research is incredibly important, and it is vital to the economic health of the country (and the world, for that matter) that money is spent on it. Where did the transistors that your nice new Intel chip is made up of come from? Basic research. How about lots of medical technology like MRI machines and x-rays? Basic research. And there are lots of indirect benefits to basic research as well. How about those snazzy digital cameras? The need for high-quality CCDs for astronomy (*cough* hubble *cough*) and for other research applications pushes that. Do you like the world wide web? Thank a bunch of physicists who put it together so they could share their data.
The point of basic research isn't the small, immediate payoff - it's the hope that somewhere along the line, some scientist is going to come up with something that will revolutionize the world - just like the transistor! So I respectfully disagree with you - while it's important for companies to be concerned with their quarterly earnings reports, in the long term, basic research is most certainly worth the investment.