Transatlantic Gigabit Gaming.. err, Research

YourHero writes: "Science Technology And Research Light-Illuminated Gigabit High-Performance Transit. All hail acronyms. U Illinois at Chicago has hooked up to SURFnet (Netherlands) at 2.5Gbps, with plans to go to 10Gbps and hook up Canada, Asia and other parts of Europe. StarLight as its called makes a monster gaming ... err. I mean 'real-time, multi-site virtual reality.' Looks like they've been racking up killer ping times for a few weeks now.

Comments

Check your bold tags

[ekrout]

STARLIGHPT (pronounced "starlipped"?) just doesn't have a nice ring to it...

;-)

STARLIGHT

[jargoone]

Science Technology And Research Light-Illuminated Gigabit High-Performance Transit. All hail acronyms.

Yeah. More like "All hail naming a project to fit a stupid acronym".

SURF on the Internet2?

[imrdkl]

Wait a minute... I thought this was for research.

Slashdot

[fliplap]

All that and they still can't survive the slashdot effect?

Of course you know...

[Dixie_Flatline]

That no matter how big the pipe is, you can't reduce ping times past a certain limit, right? You've got the whole 'speed of light' thing tripping you up. There is a certain latency that can't be defeated, no matter how many gigabits your pipe is.

Re:Of course you know...

[elefantstn]

Nonsense. Just broadcast over the Sub-Etha Net. Updates through the whole galaxy (and multiple unknown dimensions) instantaneously.

Re:Of course you know...

[the_2nd_coming]

hmmmm well perhaps then we should begin work on a quantum entagled ethernet.

ZERO PING..... whoo yeah!!!

Re:Of course you know...

[Anonymous Coward]

A ping of 1 milli-second is ALOT slower
than the speed of light , the routing
a switching and packet opening and
re-encapsulation is your time killer .

optical networking is the key to beating
this . it routes the light based on
frquency spectrum to a MAN of a cetain city
without having to open and rebuild the packets.

AKA assign a certain spectrum to a certain city,
and all DWDM optical routing sends that light
frequency to that one city , there it is
opened , and local transport over Sonet/ATM
arranged .

Alot of companies have yet to do this, but
this model is on its way to most if not all.

onsiterepair@yahoo.com

Re:Of course you know...

[JabberWokky]

It's not that easy. although M. Jacques Toussaint Benoit (de l'Herault) and M. Biat-Chretein did pioneering research into snail-telegraphs (c.f. Parsian newspaper Presse, 10/27/1850), most of the modern research into the union of galvanic, magnetic and symaphetic fluids as applied to the Etherial fluid was done as recently as 1996 by Alexis Hastings (I presume that her works were later published in the Paradigma, but a transcript of her work is available in Horizon, WW4012). Although I know that the cupric sulfate crystals are necessary to raise the imbalance to necessary levels, the dosage requirements (so as to prevent toxicity to the snails) is not recorded.

Regardless, I am sure that more research is necessary before this is useful as a reliable medium for communication, let alone the transmission of IP Datagrams.

--
Evan

Re:Of course you know...

[Dixie_Flatline]

And of course I agree. But the news post of course made reference to gaming and ping times. I'm just pointing out that it doesn't matter that they made a bigger pipe...pings don't necessarily drop.

Re:Of course you know...

[the_2nd_coming]

actualy Quantom entanglement is quite interesting in that 2 particles can communicate instantly.....when you observe a quantom entangled particle, the other particle, regardless of distance has the exact same measurments and therefor communication occured faster than light (in a spooky quantom sort of way.)

ping times?

[alienmole]

Looks like they've been racking up killer ping times for a few weeks now.

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but ping times on high speed links (with no particularly slow routers or switches in the way) are primarily limited by the speed of light and the distance travelled.

So no matter how fast the bandwidth of this connection, if it's between the US and Europe, the ping times aren't going to be a whole heck of a lot better than they were before - the distance is the main limiting factor, and it's a pretty "hard" limit too, according to my old pal, Einstein.

Re:ping times?

[cnkeller]

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but ping times on high speed links (with no particularly slow routers or switches in the way) are primarily limited by the speed of light and the distance travelled.

You're basically right on. This is my favorite essay about latency.

Re:ping times?

[haystor]

The force of gravity effectively propogates instantly, thereby reducing ping times to the speed at which you can create and destroy matter.

Canada, Asia and other parts of Europe

[Mark4ST]

...plans to go to 10Gbps and hook up Canada, Asia and other parts of Europe

Since when did Canada and Asia become "parts of Europe"? I'm always the last to know this stuff. *sigh*

Difference in pings?

[FortKnox]

Honestly, is there THAT big of a difference in 80 ping and 5 ping (as far as games are concerned)?

I haven't been to a LAN party in ages, because all my gamer friends and I have broadband, and its just as fun to play over the internet than on a LAN (and we don't have to lug our machines around).

Having a ping lower than 80 isn't all that with the games out today. Now its all about video cards, memory, and CPU power. Broadband is making people happy and satisfied (for the time being).

You too can play in the freeway!

[imrdkl]

They're taking proposals testbed projects. See the iGRID project page under the startap URL.
From the iGRID page:

How would you use a 2.5Gb (10Gb? 40Gb?) global testbed? How will you change your application codes? How will you expand the complexity of the problem you are solving? How will you take advantage of the fact that the networks are now faster than the computers driving them?

A slashdotting should show them if it works.

Depends on the game

[Ted V]

It honestly depends on the game. I can't notice any difference between 0ms and 25ms of ping, but you can feel a little bit between 50ms and 0ms in an online game. I did work with the Unlagged Q3 mod as part of unlagging my own mod, Art of War. It turns out that 50ms of time is about half of a player bounding box in Q3. So lets say a player is moving from left to right and you have a 50ms ping. If you are aimed just a little bit to the left of center, but still lined up with their bounding box, you will miss with 50ms ping and hit with 0ms ping. That's pretty important. With unlagging, I notice a huge improvement in all my hitscan weapons, even in the sub 100 ping range.

That said, Packet Loss is far worse than a high ping, and high pings don't mean as much in slower paced games like RTS games.

-Ted

Re:Depends on the game

[grammar fascist]

I'm the author of Unlagged Quake 3, so naturally I'm biased. For those of you who don't know, it's a server-side hit-scan lag compensation mod, which means there's no extra cheating and nothing to download to play. It works by remembering every player's position - and when instant-hit weapon hit tests need to be done, it tests with the players in the positions they were in at the time of attack as opposed to the time the command was actually received.

Of course, the problem with lag compensation is that it causes weird side-effects, like people hitting others around corners and without facing the proper direction, and it only gets worse as the two players involved have higher pings.

You're right, but those side-effects are much less noticeable than people like to make them out to be. The reason these "problems" sometimes seem so big is that people generally sit around and theorize about the idea rather than test it. Another issue is that there are always, always, always inconsistencies when you try to make anything real-time with latency involved. The game designer has to choose which inconsistencies he thinks he and his audience can deal with.

So let's take a look at lag compensation vs. no lag compensation in the inconsistency category to see how they stack up. First, lag compensation:

• You sometimes, but rarely, notice that you get shot when you think you're hidden
  
• You sometimes, but even more rarely, notice that the person who shot you isn't currently aiming at you (this also happens with no lag compensation, but to a lesser extent)
  
• HPB's sometimes, and still rarely, seem to make impossible shots - like they seem to rail you right after you hit a bouncepad
  

And now, without lag compensation:

• HPB's can line up a rail shot perfectly and miss
  
• Game balance is skewed by the fact that four of the weapons are nearly useless to anyone pinging over 100
  

I stand by my assertion that the inconsistencies in hit-scan lag compensation are very rare. I've been testing it for weeks now, and I've only noticed them a few times - like three. Just about everyone else who's tried it and given feedback has said about the same thing - and usually, they love it.

The only people who really hate it seem to be those who consider their broadband edge to be more important than fairer play. ("Fairer" because the low-ping player will always have the advantage.) They'll avoid it like the plague.

Even worse, still, is when a router hiccoughs and your ping spikes to 80 from 20...

Hit-scan lag compensation takes care of that, too, so it isn't just for HPB's.

My point is that people should try it out before they let the supposed problems dissuade them from it. I've just finished a server listing page that updates every five minutes. Check it out. Just remember not to aim ahead of your target with the railgun.

Re:Depends on the game

[iconian]

You are absolutely right when you say you notice a difference between 80 ms and 25 ms lag. From the human visual system perspective, 80 ms is a LONG time. Ask any psychologist and they'll tell you that many low level perceptual processes occurs under 20 ms.

Here's an indirect piece of evidence: Do you notice the difference between a motion video clip played at 15 frames/sec versus 30 frames/sec? At 15 frames/sec, one frame is displayed every ~67 ms. At 30 frames/sec, one frame is displayed every ~33 ms. The fact that most people are able to see a big difference between 15 and 30 fps suggests that most people will also notice a difference between playing a first person shooter with 30 ms lag vs 80 ms lag.

I would say when you have at least get below 15 ms to not notice any difference.

File-sharing backbone...

[Bonker]

The main problem with Gnutella and its derivatives is the fact that it relies on aggregate network bandwidth to perform searches. The Gnutella derivatives such as Limewire and Bearshare all try to get around this by keeping central search databases, but, of course, that makes them vulnerable to the same argument that killed Napster, and is starting to kill Kazaa/Morpheus/Fasttrack.

Having a huge backbone like this could make Gnutella work, at least as far as the backbone goes.

The Obvious use

[Alien54]

Great for Virtual reality with those high intensity feedback sensors.

You know someone is going to want to be first on the holodeck with pr0n, etc.

Everything is relative

[MongooseCN]

To quote a famouse obvious scientist. Sure it may be 1000X faster than a regular network but that just means we'll soon have machines putting out 1000x more data or have a 1000x more machines on a network, etc. No matter how much bandwidth there is it will always be maxed out.

Bandwidth and ping time

[Anonymous Coward]

High Bandwidth != low ping time

It can be a pipeline with 100Gbps and yet have a very high latency.

ah hem Try 480gbps!

[lonney]

The Southern Cross Cable [ http://www.southerncrosscables.com/ ]that connects us in New Zealand and Australia to the US is running at 120gbps with plans to boost it to 480...enough to transfer a 3km-high stack of typed documents or eight full-length motion pictures every second.

My boss says ...

[SirSlud]

He translated for us:

"The upgraded connection between SURFnet, the advanced research and higher education network in the Netherlands, and Abilene, an Internet2® backbone network serving over 200 universities and research centers in the United States, will enable applications such as TV-quality videoconferencing, MPEG2 video streaming, data mining and remote collaboration between researchers, teachers and students in the US and the Netherlands. "

Should be:

"The upgraded connection between SURFnet, the advanced research and higher education network in the Netherlands, and Abilene, an Internet2® backbone network serving over 200 universities and research centers in the United States, will enable applications such as TV-quality Live-Sex videoconferencing, MPEG2 video streaming of DVD porn, pleasure mining and remote collaboration (also known as Live Sex with force feedback devices, or LS-FFD) between researchers, teachers and *especially* students in the US and the Netherlands. Sometimes between teachers and students but only where extreme secrecy and power-abuse is employed."

Re:racking up killer ping times

[Stephen]

Woo Hoo! I can send a ping 'o' death to Amsterdam in 1 nanosecond!

Not unless you're within 30 cm of Amsterdam, you can't. :-)

Not very effective

[Wizard of OS]

I am connected to the net through surfnet, but I can't say I notice any differences. According to the surfnet website the link is done through TeleGlobe, and my traceroute shows teleglobe hops. Unfortunately my ping to America (specifically www.internet2.edu and www.uic.edu ) are still over 100ms ... so much for low pings.

Since this link was established half a month ago, it can't be routers that need to ajust their tables. Too bad, no high-speed pr0n^H^H^H^Hresearch material for me.

Wonderful Acronym

[Evro]

"Science Technology And Research Light-Illuminated Gigabit High-Performance Transit."

Yes, I truly love the brand new "STARLIGHPT" . Nothing rolls off the tongue quite like the word Starlighpt. Yessir!

:-D

Re:Moderators lay off the crack!

[haystor]

From http://www.ldolphin.org/vanFlandern/gravityspeed.h tml

"These causality problems would be solved without any change to the mathematical formalism of GR, but only to its interpretation, if gravity is once again taken to be a propagating force of nature in flat spacetime with the propagation speed indicated by observational evidence and experiments: not less than 2 x 10^10c"

That's a damn site faster than c. To me, when talking in the context of the earth, this is effectively instant.

Its only nonsensical crap if you think I'm proposing we build matter constructors/destructors with every router. However in the context of this thread, as long as we are going to be as impractical as drilling through the earth, we might as well go all the way. Some might regard this as funny. I would think that if this is nonsensical crap, drilling through the earth might have been as well. Of course you drilled further down into this thread which might make you a nonsensical reader, then commented on it...

Of course others may regard the idea that gravity propogates faster than light as "interesting".

We can do better than light!

[mcrbids]

I remember reading something, and I just can't find it - that you could effectively communicate at a speed much greater than light. (Theoretically, 0 ms to the other end of the Universe!)

Rather than send a beam of light to the destination, as we're doing now, you take an existing beam of light and change an interference pattern within the beam.

Then you measure the interference pattern. I honestly didn't fully understand the full implications of it, involving quantum theory and all, but the upshot is that the message could, in theory, be transmitted at many times the speed of light this way.

Anybody know of a link? (Damn!)

the 1500's..

[freeweed]

..and ever since then, we have a EUROPEAN head of state, a EUROPEAN leader on our currency, and are for many purposes considered just a colony of the UK. :)