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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 =(
Try and slashdot that !
Well the old European backbone was creaking slightly, so you can either upgrade incrementally to keep slightly ahead of demand, or oversupply now in the knowledge that in the next 5-10 years demand is going to keep going up and up.
Sounds like they made the right choice to me.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
"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"
No, what would be a waste of time and money would be if it was at 100% traffic - the whole point about building a network like this is that it will cope with researchers' increasing demands for bandwidth for years to come. Of course traffic's low to start with, because people have been living with much lower bandwidth for years and don't suddenly start sending loads more data the second a new backbone appears. The bandwidth will be used when it's required, not when it's available.
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.
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
Pib.
"NEVER, EVER feed your computer beer" - some
Not for academic institutions. Before I left my previous job, I was connected to JANET, the Joint Academic Network. I could quite regularly download at over 1 megaBYTE/s from other universites. Granted many sites in the US were still slow, but my local Debian mirror was shit hot ;-)
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.
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.
They most definately will find uses for it. I heard recently about the transfer of raw sequencing trace files (for the Human Genome Project) transfered from the UK-->USA. Turns out there wasnt enough bandwidth (these things are basically huge image files, and there are ALOT of them). Therefore they ship them over on DAT tapes.
Furthermore, I quite regurlarly download multi-gigabyte quantaties of data for academic research.
Yeah, 640KB is enough memory for anyone.
Plus, the Internet2 backbone is moving to OC192 in the near term. Saturate that...
"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).
I quite regurlarly download multi-gigabyte quantaties of data for academic research
Recent into skin tone reproduction in MPEG video is it? Hehe..
http://twitter.com/onion2k
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.
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.
Dude that 10Gbps, the G meaning Giga.
When someone yells "Stop" or goes limp, or taps out, the fight is over.
- 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
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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.
Think forward planning.
Tom.
Oh arse
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?
They are all Internet2 peers. Check the Internet2 peering list at http://www.internet2.edu/abilene/html/peernetworks .html
Intercarve Networks, LLC
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. ).
---
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!
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
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)
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.
Wasted? I think a new network would be expected to be big enough for a few years, otherwise that would be a waste.
The rule of thumb in a network such as this is that the bandwidth needed doubles every 9 months.
Therefore the prediction from the rule of thumb is that this network will suffice for about 4 years and then it will be full.
It looks sufficient to me, but it's not too much bandwidth by any means.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"That includes a lot of the less populated land masses. Like oh.. huge chunks of russia...
This is humor right? You are joking, right? I do hope so.
Just in case you're not, here are a few facts from Encarta for you:
In both total area and geographic extent Russia is the largest country in the world. With an area of 17,075,200 sq km (6,592,800 sq mi), Russia constitutes more than one-ninth of the world's land area and nearly twice the area of the United States or China.
Notice that Russia is a country. It is not part of Europe.
And for christsakes, please look at a map before posing another comment.
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
Did you mean to type 10:66? Certainly you aren't claiming that the UK has not had to repel an invading force in the last 900 years. That would be a silly assertion, even if you don't consider open, armed rebellions as "invasions" there's always the Battle of Britain, and lets not forget the Falklands.
FWIW here's a list of current territorial disputes from the CIA fact book:
Northern Ireland issue with Ireland (historic peace agreement signed 10 April 1998); Gibraltar issue with Spain; Argentina claims Falkland Islands (Islas Malvinas); Argentina claims South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands; Mauritius and the Seychelles claim Chagos Archipelago (UK-administered British Indian Ocean Territory); Rockall continental shelf dispute involving Denmark and Iceland; territorial claim in Antarctica (British Antarctic Territory) overlaps Argentine claim and partially overlaps Chilean claim; disputes with Iceland, Denmark, and Ireland over the Faroe Islands continental shelf boundary outside 200 NM
Si vis pacem, para bellum
The only thing more annoying than a Libertarian is an (un|mis)informed Libertarian
The land area of eruope is about 2,269,180 hectares. The land area of europe minus the "Russian Federation", which is as far as I know a part of Eruope, is a mere 569600 hectares.
Of course you are using very different figures from the ones I took from Encarta - they are from 1993, so don't take into account certain little changes since then.
But anyway, using your table, you're right, Europe is about 570k hectares, and the USA is 957k hectares - a difference, but not a vast one.
However, back to the original point. I consider the argument that Europe has GSM and the USA doesn't because it is 'easier' in Europe to be rubbish.
As far as I understand they still lag behind us in DSL capacity.
As far as you understand, or is this an assumption you have made because you assume that surely the USA must be more advanced than Europe in these things? I live between the UK and Spain and I have 2Mbps DSL connections to my homes in both places, and have had for a while now.
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 :)
Russia is both a country and (partially) part of Europe and (partially) part of Asia. Europe is a strange continent because it's not physically separated from Asia (thus the term "Eurasia"). The bits of the ex-Soviet Union which form today's Russia's straddles both continents.
...
Your either misusing or misunderstanding Encarta or you've run afoul of yet another Microsoft bug
You forgot to read the part of the CIA fact book that defines the geographical boundaries of the UK. The "United Kingdom" refers specifically to England and Scotland.
Think "United States" for a minute. Japan invaded the Phillipines, for instance, in 1941 but we don't speak of the United States as having been invaded. We speak of our colony the Phillipines as having been invaded (and occupied).
The Battle of Britain was not an invasion, which by definition involves ground forces.
Northern Ireland's not been invaded by a foreign power. It's a domestic dispute. The closest foreign power is Eire, and they've stayed out of it.
The other examples you give all involve foreign possessions of Great Britain.
And of course "territorial disputes" are not necessarily invasions by foreign powers in the first place. Most of those you mention involve nothing more than diplomatic snit-fits.
Please tell me they're not running IPv4 on it.