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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."
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.
"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.
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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 ;-)
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.
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).
I quite regurlarly download multi-gigabyte quantaties of data for academic research
Recent into skin tone reproduction in MPEG video is it? Hehe..
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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.
- 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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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.
there are no stupid questions, but there are a lot of inquisitive idiots
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 )
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
Also, the presentation that explains how it works (which is reasonably straight-forward in theory, yet implementation seems quite sophisticated with some filtering done to remove noise from results) is worth reading. And for real "hard-core" network measurement stuff you can read the doctorate thesis Vern Paxson wrote, I think it's available from same download site... Good read if you really are interested about TCP performance analysis. The tool was (AFAIK) written for the thesis.
I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization -- Oliver Wendell Holmes
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.)
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>Consumer use of the internet will still get most content from America
I think your logic is a bit flawed.
The pipes to the U.S. do not necessarily carry data originating from the U.S.
It shows that a large amount of traffic is routed through the U.S.
This may include data originating in the US, but also data from Europe. It may even include data originating from Europe and targeted for Europe.
"Between strong and weak, between rich and poor [...], it is freedom which oppresses and the law which sets free"