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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."
Have no backbone =(
Sorry if this is a dumb question. I guess I was just wondering if it would ever turn out that all these networks would join up someday, or if we'll end up needing multiple computers to connect to all the different internets (should we want to), or if we'll have high-speed backbones connecting the backbones...
Sorry, I'm a programmer. I don't know any more network stuff than is necessary to download pr0n on my breaks.
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Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...
That's cool and all, but the backbone's not the problem. The last mile's the problem.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
a single percent of it's total capacity right now.
What does that mean? It's not even using up, in almost all cases, any more than a 1Gbps line would be using. Take a look at all that blue on the map. It seems to signify that this was a waste of time and money.
Basically, I'm all for this great stuff, but until they find a use for it, it's just money wasted when it could be going to places and projects in technology that could actually benefit.
Try and slashdot that !
It connects 30 countries... and is not in the USA?
Gee-ahnt? Jeeant? How do you pronoune this silly, silly acronym?
Everything is mainstream now.
"Yes, it exists, and this research network is not even in the U.S.!"
As if that's something hard to believe... considering the fast networks already developed and in development in Canada and Japan you'd think we could give other countries the credit they deserve. It's not like the US is the only country that knows how to string an Ethernet cable.
What's up people? This was supposed to be a lighthearted joke. Now everyone's twatting and shitting all over the place!
I'll leave the mop and bucket right here.
Ugh, I'm tired.
FYI: there are people in the world that think in different ways than you, and it does not mean that they are _worse_.
Oh yeah, something like 'giant' in French. But how would I know, we're all just ignorant /.ers and the world still revolves around America.
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The Cap is nigh. Time to get a fresh new account.
Dude - lighten up. It's a joke.
God forbid someone should make a joke about the French language.
I'm tired.
Great now all my downloads of adul^H^H^H^H research content from the Netherlands will get to me faster.
I hate e-commerce t-shirt
Think Joke.
Sorry, I guess the Funny Bone is turned off.
Or you can't figure jokes out without smileys.
I'm not trying to be a poseur, but really it doesn't. Let me put it into perspective another way: Right now with my measly cable modem I can download from many sites at 2Mbps+ (I get a sustained 220KB/s from Microsoft). That means that a mere 77 of me can saturate a T3, and 5,000 of me can saturate a 10Gbps. Now everyone doesn't download at the same time, but when you're talking about Europe with 100s of millions of people... BTW: I realize that this is a research network not for public consumption, but my point is moreso that it's apparently such a big deal that these 10Gbps connections exist. 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.
Why? Why??
No, it's a giant step in attempts to thwart slashdotting.
The Blaster Master Fighting for Truth, Justice, and Evil Pie since 1979
Hmm, it'd be pretty hard to slashdot geant.
Speaking from a UK perspective, our academical network (JANET) has already rolled out something similar to this. OK, it's a fraction of 10gbps - at 622mbps. Obviously every university doesn't get that amount of bandwidth; it's usually around 155mbps going into each major city I think. However, I believe geant will pave the way for some serious warezing!
I'd rather have a bowl of coco-pops.
Plus, the Internet2 backbone is moving to OC192 in the near term. Saturate that...
Well, I live in Luxembourg (Go Luxembourg! Woohoo!), and I seriously wonder to what they're running that line. Luxembourg (much to my chagrin) doesn't have an actual university. Makes me wonder. That, and the fact that that one line represents something like half the bandwidth running into the country...(actually, I think it's like a quarter. Either way, I'll never see any of it.:)
...but it's being eaten...by some...Linux or something...
"Wow, well done guys. Our new multi-gagabyte network is now fully operational"
"Cheers...."
"Uh... Boss, hold on...."
"What?"
"Someone just posted us to slashdot!"
*Poof* goes the bandwidth
Seriously though, if they get slashdotted their really isnt any hope for the rest of us.
Yes, it exists, and this research network is not even in the U.S!
Gosh! Outside the US! In Europe!
The Europeans really seem to be advancing don't they? A friend of mine visited Europe and told me that they've got TV, computers, mobile telephones, everything! How long before they catch up with the US?
However, they are still really lagging in cultural things. They don't have that many great places to hang out as in the US like Starbucks or MacDonalds (just little coffee shops and resturants which are all different!) and they don't have so many TV channels (and a lot of the ones they do have are in funny languages!). And they aren't as advanced politically as the US - they don't have the personal freedoms that we have, like the feedom to carry guns and, er, the other freedoms that we have.
(Yes, this is sarcasm).
the internet is still U.S.-centric. Perhaps what you yanks don't realise is is that most well developed countries actually have decent internal networks, but since the lion's share of Internet content is hosted in America, this is irrelevant, since it is the pipe to the U.S. that matters.
The diagram shows this - the two U.S. pipes are at around 30-50% utilisation (and are the smallest of the network), while the giant internal linkups are around 1-2%. What this says to me is that research typically doesn't use the bandwidth that they've provided for with this project. Consumer use of the internet will still get most content from America.
But I guess there is always merit in planning for the future, and we can always benefit from making the internet less 'any-one-particular-country'-centric (despite it's origins in ARPA etc).
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.
So what's so special about 10Mbps? Am I missing the point?
Mr. Ska
Are accents written on capital letters? I got the impression they usually weren't.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
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.
of course the majority of the network doesn't exist in the US.. since it's a european network.. it's like saying that China doesn't exist in the US.. it doesn't, except for the embassies and the spies..
but what were those two US connections I saw on the GEAN network (sorry I don't have that funny looking G on it.. I'm too lazy to hit my character map to copy and paste it) US1 and US2? looks like someone's leeching off of my adsl.. funny, there's a 10GB/s backbone growing out of my dsl connection!
This is a word, not an acronym- it's probably being spelled in caps for same reason Unix is UNIX (cos the guys in charge like the way it looks that way) I'm not sure if accents are used on caps, but the existence within the char set suggest they are to me
J-aims
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Yo, whatever happened to peas? Join T( H)GS
- They're not even using 1% of capacity
- They should invest more in the last mile
I think that their idea might be to restructure the backbone services so that they are able to handle the imminent speed and reliability increases in the last mile.In future news we'll be seeing things like:
x Telecomms corporation runs fibre in the last mile giving millions of European households the faster internet access that was made possible with the introduction of Géant's new backbone network.
I may be wrong, but that's just my $0.02
Follow me
I remeber when I was at Texas A&M I could get really good ping times on servers at Harvard, University of Texas (gasp), and other schools on the I2 for playing quake. Its funny what a traceroute will turn up. Thank you Internet2 :)
JOhn
Campaign for Liberty
There was a recent (last decade or so) ruling on this by the official guardians of the French language (not sure which group). It is now optional, whereas prior to the ruling accents were required.
As a french-speaking Belgian, I can tell you that I was taught in school that you don't put accents on caps. Maybe it's not a hard rule and you can go either way. I do however remember playing with my dad's typewriter when I was a kid and there was no way to put an accent on a capital letter.
Geesh, apparently someone needs to receive to be sent to re-education camp.
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.
Outdoor digital photography, mostly in New Engl
With all the comments about using it for faster downloads, etc, etc, people seem to be missing the fact that it'll only really speed your downloads up if you're accessing another site on GEANT. Personally when I was a student, connecting to other academic sites was never particularly slow - but JANET (the UK academic net) doesn't have particularly good peering to transatlantic links (clearly due to the cost).
What GEANT will help make more possible is inter-site co-operation, and apps like high bandwidth video streams. In response to the guy who said it was a waste of money - give it time?
Seriously though, this has ( as the US based Education networks and the like do ) the capability to further increase benefits for all of the students and researchers at the connected institutions. One of the things that Internet2 doesn't have in quite as much abundance is overwhelming raw bandwidth availability. Can't find the time to visit another school to attend a lecture? A course you want to take isn't offered at your school, but is at another one?
Realtime video and remote tele-presence applications will easily consume this bandwidth and more ( assuming they aren't drowned out by DIVX and MP3s flying around. ).
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Segmentation Fault ( core dumped )
From what I understand, the need for so much bandwidth is due to the new particle accelerator at CERN, which'll be coming on line in a few years time. When that gets run, it'll generate data in the region of gigabits/s; that's why there's all these massive data pipes pointing at Switzerland - it's to shunt off all the data around Europe to get processed!
he never said that america was the best. Typical illerate response. he was stating experiences in america, and comparing americas network. he said it was extrodinary, never bashing europes or anything of the sort. Arogant america, wrong, arogant troll who needs to stop bashing america (atleast when its unfounded, fair game when it is founded)
Where is the bandwidth being used right now? Not on the intraeuropean 10 Gbps links, noooooo! It's being used on the weakest links, the ones connected to US1 and US2. Looks like the porn is much better on this side of the Atlantic. At least, that's what the eurostudents think...
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
Intercarve Networks, LLC
You know you are a geek when you look at that network bandwidth image with the blue lines and drool. It is better than pr*n!
I wanna move to Berlin!
--jeff
ipv6 is my vpn
Academie Francaise (sorry to lazy to figure out the cedille and the accent on my US keyboard :)
Perhaps their weathermap was just pruned for space... or does the network not have connections to NORDUNET (the backbone network that connects universities of nordic countries, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Iceland... and to other backbones like NSFnet or whatever it's called now)? Seems kind of weird if that is the case; the most connected countries in Europe not connected to this one?!
I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization -- Oliver Wendell Holmes
Second, someone complained that they're only using a tiny percent of the bandwidth. Uhhh, the idea is to have SPARE capacity on a network. The three-way hook-up between Russia, Britain and the USA, for tele-surgery becomes actually practical for more than just extreme "he's very rich, but hasn't a hope in hell" cases. We might start seeing multi-national virtual operating theatres, capable of making use of a far wider range of skills than ever before possible.
IMHO, spending a few Euro more on slightly higher-quality fibre, and a few more frequencies of laser, is peanuts in terms of the total cost of a project like this, but offers the potential for fantastic endeavors that might actually benefit people.
The existing Internet would be fine, for most things, if it weren't loaded down with prawn and spam. However, it is, and we have to accept that. We also need to accept that the SERIOUS work on the Internet eats bandwidth for breakfast. When you're into real-time remote operation of a nuclear particle accelerator, online surgery, high-speed train emergency braking systems, etc, you really can't afford dropped packets, let alone serious lag.
Sure, AOLers can handle lag, just fine. What difference does an extra few minutes make, in a 2-hour download of a pirated DVD? Why the hell should they care about packet collisions or TCP retransmits?
But there are plenty of people, for whom a single packet collision could also be the last, if it happens at just the wrong moment. When you start talking about conditions like this, you absolutely need massive bandwidth. In fact, you really need three times that*.
(*It's a rule-of-thumb that network lag becomes significant, once you exceed one-third of the network's capacity. The odds of some form of data corruption, at that point, become too high to do even basic scientific work. You REALLY want the network to stay around the 1-5% region, for the high-end stuff.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
And to think I wasted my last moderator point on some dumbass troll, when I could have waited for your glorious post and given it the attention it deserves.
I'd forgotten that. Europe has a tiny land mass of 3,998,000 sq miles, whereas the USA has a massive land mass of 3,717,796 sq miles...
DAMN those facts! It's so much easier to spit off mindless hyperpole a la Rush Limbaugh than actually doing some research! Thanks, friend.
- Rev.At least he pointed where SSE2 was optimized, he did compare oranges with oranges as far as the x86 platform goes.
Tom missed the obvious comparing Intel-heavily-optimized-SSE2-scene (skull with radiosity) with Athlon like if it was a simple 3d benchmark (he never mentionned the SSE2 optimisation in the radiosity engine that newtek boosted in 7.0b). At least Ace points it out and points out the difference in the render pipeline, which I find VERY professionnal and reliable, tom sucked big time at it, he even got nice emails telling him how to best benchmark on lightwave to make his number constant and not falling into the "specifically optimized for x or y operation" and like he does best: he didn't listen and continued with his flawed benchmarking on the LW platform.
Kudos Ace.
--- Metamoderating abusive downgraders since my 300th post.
Lines to the US are the only ones being used at higher than 1%... my theory is that's the Slashdot effect of everyone on this side of the pond looking at their "weather map".
"Love is never saying you're too proud." -Tonic
What is this world coming to? Slashdot, usually known for it's levelheaded, facts-based postings (but only after everybody reads the articles) is having a US v. Europe thread. My god i never thought I would see that. At least it is well based in reality with little biased mudslinging being done.
(yup, this too, is sarcasm)
c'mon guys, how many times do we have to have the same discussion.
Some quick math shows the countries included in the GEANT project to have a combined land mass of 3,020,000 sq. km. The continental United States has a land mass of ~7,300,000 sq. km (excluding Alaska), but of course if you're talking about Europe then you might as well add Canada in there at another ~9,200,000 sq. km. Of course you are 100% correct: It is astounding how many standards Europe ratifies with the many languages, cultures, etc.
Having said that I said in another message that this really didn't seem all that big of a pipe, which of course rose the ire of defensive Europeans, yet take a look at http://www.psi.net/news/pr/00/dec13.html (that's from a year ago), http://www.x-changemag.com/hotnews/1bh754256.html. ..hell I can find dozens of carriers that have OC-192 or better backbones all over North America.
I had wondered why the link to my UK server suddenly nosedived. All the extra bandwidth is now DOSing the US transatlantic links...
while (sig==sig) sig=!sig;
who here groaned and thought "well, timothy can't even spell giant" until they read the post?
While we were in Edinburgh, we went into one that was about a block off of Queen Street in Edinburgh. While the area where we were in was something that tourists would have enjoyed being, it seemed that a substantive number (definitely more than 50%) were locals with all the brogues and british accents that were present.
While it's not a representative sample by any stretch, it does disprove your generalization.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
This was it. Everything would have been fine and dandy, until the submitter said, "and it's not even in the US!". There are many practical reasons why each region of the world needs its own high-speed research network. No regional defensiveness would have been felt if the person who submitted this hadn't started it.
There's a Linux, BSD, Solaris, etc... anyone know of a DOS or Windows equivalent utility?
Its fine to steal your money for corporate welfare. Your business model isn't working? Thats ok we'll just keep you alive so you can further mismanage the nations resources.
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WHO ATE MY BREAKFAST PANTS?
I guess Internet2 is nice in that it doesn't have to share traffic with the commercial Internet, but I still would've expected an academic network to have faster connections than what the rest of us get to use :)
According to this article
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"Internet2 plans to offer 10 gigabit capacity by 2003," says Marine Chartois of Dante. "By that time I think we will already be looking at 40 gigabits per second. That covers a larger area, more people and a much more difficult environment."
Well, the problem will be "what to do with 40 Gb/s ?".CA*NET 3 - CANARIE's National Optical Internet
Please tell me they're not running IPv4 on it.
Current UN figures put the European population at around 727 Million. I'd underestimated ours a bit, it turns out its 284 million. That puts you at a bit over two and a half times what our population is.
Why?