A GEANT Leap Forward In Networking For Research

An anonymous reader contributes: "A research backbone network interconnecting more than 30 countries, through which hundreds of universities can exchange traffic, with a backbone running at 10 Gbps, born on the 1st of December. Yes, it exists, and this research network is not even in the U.S.! GEANT is a european initiative which has just come online, so if you're a student in Europe, you may have noticed a significant change in your downloads speeds since last week. You can even check its weathermap! Well, obviously backbone links are still unused ... but that shouldn't last long, once people notice the sheer amount of bandwidth."

Comments

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[Marcus Brody]

There was interesting article about this a few weeks ago in the gaurdian newspaper.

Although it's pretty thin on technical details, it does provide some insight into some of the questions people are posting, such as why they need all this bandwidth, why the US arent part of the project etc.

btw, OC192 is (essentially) 10 Gbps

[tcyun]

I prob should have mentioned that OC192 is essentially 10Gbps in my earlier post. This means that Internet2 will be equiv (in terms of backbone speed) to GEANT in the near term. (You can read the PR about the Internet2 upgrade if you are interested.

Re:Doesn't really sound like that much...

[cnkeller]

This naturally makes me wonder what sort of backbones exist on the North America network, because I never have a problem downloading at 220KB/second, so I presume it must be pretty extraordinary.

There is a program called pathchar which seems to do a pretty good job of characterizing pipe size. I've used this to monitor my DSL bandwidth; PacBell has a 45Mbit line heading out of it's DSLAM's (at least in my area). It was designed to be used with symmetric connections, my DSL line (1.5/128) reports like 330K, but otherwise it's a good start at measuring paths.

From my office to microsoft's ftp servers I was easily able to determine that the slowest link is our T1 bewteen the ISP's T3 and our 10Mbps interface on our external router.

Some Perspective

[bjtuna]

This addresses fundamental routing issues, so my apologies to most of you, however I think some of this crowd needs some clarification (albeit a simplified version):

To all those who are posting such things as "now all I need is fiber to my home" or "I wonder if the Slashdot effect can saturate it" or "how come my ping times to it are so slow?":

You should know that hosts on these networks are generally a mix of globally- and non-globally-accessable. Meaning, many POPs that are "hooked up" to some high-speed initiative like vBNS or Abilene also have "commodity links." Commodity links are normal T3s, etc that are hooked up to a commercial ISP. This makes the site multi-homed, and helps minimize the amount of non-research-related traffic being sent over the high-speed links, because if you want to look at www.cnn.com from, say, a vBNS-connected box, it'll go over the commodity link instead of vBNS.

So the answer is, yes: the Slashdot effect can probably affect GEANT's web site because the Slashdot effect would flood their commodity link. On the other hand, if you were at a GEANT node... good luck trying, and enjoy the pings :)

-Brian
brian@internet2.edu