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Intenet2 Backbone Upgrades
An anonymous reader "Looks like Abilene, the backbone for Internet2 will join Canada's CA*Net3 and Europe's GEANT as one of the fastest research networks on the planet. According to this press release, Internet2 will be deploying 11 of Juniper network's freshly announced T640 platform. These puppies can cram 32 OC-192 (or 128 OC-48) interfaces into a single chassis. All in half a rack, too!" I'm
sure those students are very happy with their ping times. Meanwhile in the
real world... ;)
You may not need that bandwith, but researchers at universities working on projects requiring high bandwith (3d rendering of medical images, video, etc) do require it for real time application development. The internet2 was setup to allow this, without making the universities have have to use the commercial part of it everyone is on.
Students just get the added advantage of the high speed connections of game play with other students at other universities.
Ofcourse your joking. :-) And everybody knows MP3's don't take that much bandwidth. Movies do :-)
:-)
But yes we do need that bandwidth. Espescially in Research and in Healthcare. I'm now doing some work on hooking up some healthcare organisations to glassfiber. They've done some interesting trials where they have several cameras and sensors looking at the patient, who is performing a walking excercise. The knowledge of the way a person is supposed to walk and the problems associated with that is scattered around the country. For half an hour they watch with several experts from across the country. Every doctor can interact with the patient and with each other. They can point things out to eachother etc. This results in better treatments and the identification of specific problems.
The amount of bandwidth that is needed for this is quite high. 5 to 6 cams with real-time video and real-time sensor read outs and then real-time discussions over multiple locations. Now imagine they do this for multiple patients at the same time
And then ofcourse there was the doctor that asked us if he could send real-time MRI scans to colleagues in the USA. (an estimated 1Gbit+/second):-)
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No, Microsoft is not on Internet2.
:)
traceroute research.microsoft.com
traceroute to research.microsoft.com (131.107.65.14), 30 hops max, 38 byte packets
1 gallgtwy (134.231.4.2) 592.570 ms 40.421 ms 9.430 ms
2 gallgw (192.26.10.1) 0.557 ms 0.540 ms 0.459 ms
3 d3-2-1-1.a00.mclnva02.us.ra.verio.net (168.143.233.85) 1.308 ms 1.188 ms
[Lines deleted]
Verio is our Internet uplink.
If I go to UMD, my network goes through I2 with 1ms ping times.
traceroute www.umd.edu
traceroute to websrv1.umd.edu (128.8.10.105), 30 hops max, 38 byte packets
1 gallgtwy (134.231.4.2) 2.251 ms 2.226 ms 2.689 ms
2 gallgw (192.26.10.1) 0.870 ms 0.613 ms 0.488 ms
3 clpk-t3-1-3-2.maxgigapop.net (206.196.177.133) 1.490 ms 1.484 ms 1.570 ms
4 wash-umcp.maxgigapop.net (206.196.177.50) 5.203 ms 380.967 ms 8.777 ms
5 Vlan14.css-core-r1.net.umd.edu (128.8.7.193) 1.767 ms 1.666 ms 1.577 ms
6 websrv1.umd.edu (128.8.10.105) 1.792 ms 1.631 ms 1.604 ms
It is great to hear the Internet2 is still developing. Hopefully, grid computing and VR will be two killer apps for Internet2. With that speed, we can probably run our games on a remote server, only receiving a bit-by-bit dump that we stream directly to our monitor, almost completely eliminating the need for a video card.
Seriously, though. Extreme bandtwidth like this can benefit the Unix crowd, by making thin clients a more feasible technology. PS2 with broadband internet and X11 should be able to run remotely run heavy apps. Anybody tried yet?
Stop the brainwash
Maybe more like capacity. I'm a student at Indiana University (Bloomington campus) and we have had some of the most horrendous ping times I've ever seen. As net capacity here has gone up, ping times have gone down. I once enjoyed Quake 3 ping times of around 30ms for most sites I played at. Now, I'm really lucky if I could get under 100ms. Four years ago, IU had a couple of T1's for the entire network (residence halls and the academic part of campus.) Now, we have dual T3's: one for academia and one for the residence halls. I've tracked the latency problems by periodically pinging Yahoo from the command line (which seemed as good a guage as any, since it was never previously more than about 60ms.) Well, depending on the time of day and the orbit of the planets, etc. I might get a ping time for Yahoo anywhere between 45ms and 550ms. Yes, 550ms. It's like someone added a component to the network that adds lag. The best part about the increase in lag is that it slowly fluctuates throughout the day and universally adds to any non-campus (and non-internet2) site or server. So, last year I gave up online gaming all together because I just couldn't get ping times that were acceptable anymore. And to top it off, the graphs of internet use did not correspond to the times when the lag was greatest. It made no sense, and the IT people here didn't know what to tell me when I asked them about this. Oh well. It's probably a good thing I gave up gaming.
Hopefully this goes a step in the direction of good ping times again.
Oh well.
-K
DWDM would allow a single ring to cram anywhere from 32 x to 256 x the OC-192 capacity, on a single fibre (and on expensive equipment, that goes without saying :)
All major telcos/routers companies have nice DWDM offerings already today, and much more in their labs. Links: Nortel, Lucent, Cisco ...
But these P2P apps adapt (simply because they are evil) and we are already seeing increases traffic. So guess what? We have to buy more bandwidth. I wonder if Joe Taxpayer likes the idea that his pennies on the dollar toward education go for through bandwidth at a blackhole so kids can playu Quake instead of studying. We roll the 622Mbps link on July 1 with one of those badass Juniper routers ($80000) to boot.
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
The router flows for some of the routers on Internet2 still show a lot of file sharing apps even on Internet2. Heres a break down for the LOSA router (I believe that's Los Angeles).
port flows octets packets duration
FastTrack 22.010 26.377 17.495 19.339
Gnutella 8.358 5.069 7.138 11.082
http 4.201 4.566 2.565 1.151
ftp-data 0.738 3.284 1.866 0.915
eDonkey-2000 0.896 1.132 0.769 1.111
ssh 0.428 1.063 0.753 0.337
Neomodus-Direct 0.591 0.706 0.823 1.057
51872 0.017 0.513 0.302 0.086
ftp 0.636 0.444 0.337 0.296
aol 0.139 0.428 0.302 0.291
bbh
It was before the boom of P2P apps but right when streaming audio was becoming very popular. we shared an isdn line for the entire office.
that chick who was like our office generalist, handled everything from HR, accounting, supplies, kept listening to streaming audio tho we told her to NOT DO THAT. influential thing she was.
it goes to show what happens when you make significant network resources available to undeducated, careless masses. this is sad. completely outrageous, unethical ...
But hey ... didn't take us long to figure out real audio streaming ports and her internal ip address and make adequate temporary adjustments to router settings >:]
but i can imagine how evil and out-of-hand p2p shit must get on college campuses. dewd just block the sorority chix. make'em come to you for help ;]
seriously tho, when i was in college, we could only use the in-dorm ethernet LAN if we registered our computer's unique MAC address with UCS (university computing services). The dhcp server would assign us an ip address upon booting when it recognizes that MAC address. i'm wondering how practical (most likely not) it would be to use a similar scheme to monitor bandwidth usage and network activity?
but hey. *we* were the geeks.
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You are only rolling out 622mbps now?
The Swedish University Network (sunet) has just upgraded to 2.4gbps to each uni with 10gbps backbone. And they hope it will be enough for 4-5 years.
The old one was 622mbps in the backbone and 155 to each uni. And that network has been overloaded for the last years.
Considering that the Unis in the US are much larger one would have thought you had fatter pipes. Is it common with so "bad" connectivity over there?
Check out these pretty pictures of the bandwidth usage at CU Boulder.
Salient features: Kazaa + Gnutella = 15% of our traffic (in and out), people run more FTP servers than they download from (4.2% up, 2.7% down), and pr0n-searching newsgroup readers account for 4.4% of downstream bandwidth usage.
Oh, don't forget to check out the graph labeled "Campus I/O By Network" (towards the bottom, mostly green). ResNet is the on-campus dorm network, JILA is a huge government research thing on campus, and I have no idea what Johnson is)
Consider the state of the current Internet -- banner ads, pop-ups, pop-unders, email virii, web browser virii, web server virii, Flash web design, and 'content delivery' systems which are more annoying than their content is valuable.
If the Common Man gets access to the Internet2, then the Common Business will follow, trying to suck his pockets clean. Many of the Common Problems above will follow as side-effects.
Consider also that many areas still aren't wired with sufficient bandwidth to handle the garden-hose-like Internet1, much less the firehose-like Internet2. (Thank you, telephone hegemony.) Dialups will become all but worthless, as the only way to get decent speed for all those new Internet2 services is to move into increasingly crowded population centers. Or people will learn to do without, diminishing the value of the Internet2 that way.
Or to paraphrase Basil Fawlty, "This would be a great Internet if it weren't for all the users."
Pessimism? I prefer to think of it as a "crushing lack of faith in the general public and human nature."
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