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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... ;)
Without napster, do we really need all that bandwidth anymore? ;-)
Slashdot needs a speel cheeker...
Kramer
"What's this script do? unzip ; touch ; finger ; mount ; gasp ; yes ; umount ; sleep Hint for the answer: not everyth
"...and this is why I think it is very important to study the effects, upon international policy-making by semi-marginalized non-governmental stakeholders, of three-day Quake matches. I thank the comittee for their time."
Carousel is a lie!
"Designed for deterministic performance with 640-Gbps font-panel throughput and 1,280-Gbps rear-panel throughput"
That's a lot of bandwidth killed if someone trips on the power cord.
"A terrorist is someone who has a bomb but doesn't have an air force." -William Blum
The internet? that thing still around?
-Homer
My University is on it, and when I download from ftp.crc.ca (they mirror many things) I max out at 10Mbps.. Now if I could only get Acadia to upgrade to 100Mbps on the lan. *sigh*
Here comes the obligatory "Here comes the obligatory 'Imagine the ping times' post" post. Recursive/nested obligatory posting. Hmm.
loply.com
Damn i wish i could get a line hooked up somewhere along the line, i think its a great way to pick up chicks u know: "Wanna go to my place, i have such low ping times ^_^"
;)[/serious mode]
[serious mode]I think this is a great thing for university's across the globe, so that information can exchange information fast again without being slowed down by everyone playing quake at the school computers...oh ok quake will always slow it down a little but on a larger scale the speed quakes takes is not that big now anymore
Damn, with that much pipe, do they even know what a ping time is?
"The time it takes for a packet to go there and back? Why even bother to measure such a small amount of time?"
It hurts when I pee.
You know, Microsoft is on Internet2. They have a site, research.microsoft.com that's stuck on it (which routes to them internally). I always wondered why I could hit 1meg a second to windowsupdate.microsoft.com from the campus I used to work at... Then I found out.
Cool! Amazing Toys.
Has sweet bandwidth allright, but you cant use it for anything out side the research network. So all those napster type progies wont get a bit of it, and its also not that usefull for general surfing. however, my friend sucked down a redhat iso in 12 minutes From The NRC's ftp to his machine in @ Carleton U.
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
Yes, we are very happy with how fast our Quake 3 Arena games are...
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 page at Geante,
An important element of GÉANT is the development of connectivity with equivalent Research Networks in other world regions. Connectivity is being consolidated with the existing equivalents of GÉANT in North America (Abilene, CA*net) and in Asia-Pacific (SINET, KOREN, SingAREN) and developed further between Europe and the Asia-Pacific, North American, South American and Mediterranean regions
a bunch of extra regions get connected as well.
You would expect the slashdot *editors* would have discovered the distinction between latency and troughput by now. 128 (or whatever) OC-12 running in parallell does not give you a lower ping-time than a single one. (unless your high ping is caused by congestion)
What it does is allow you to transfer more data. Consider this analogy: Sending a hundred postcards at once doesn't make your message get there faster, but it *does* give you space for a longer message.
Ofcourse Internet2 is also built to have low latencies, however the humongous bandwith doesn't contribute directly to this, except as in making congestion less likely.
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 ...
we do enjoy our ping times. :) I'm enrolled at IUPUI, which has the I2/Abilene NOC. Quite an interesting place. In fact, the only thing that slows down our connections is when we ahve to get on the "regular" internet. All kidding aside, I don't think students have access to I2 simply through their connections, though I do know that connections to other I2 nodes goes through the I2 network, which greatly increases speeds for those connections. Usually, only people doing research need to connect to other universities... but sometimes you run across some interesting servers passing traffic along I2 ;)
The rest of the world also counts, for example, the asia-pacific continent with SINET, KOREN, and SingAREN.
Just my 5 EuroCents, Johan.
I'm on the campus resnet at my school, and any traffic that goes to another *.edu (for the most part) is routed through internet2 which is very nice. However, my dorm only has 10mbps hubs in the building, and the bandwidth usage and collisions on the hub can get so bad (which is quite often) that it really doesn't matter what size pipe is carrying data off campus. It's always nice when you can ping internet and internet2 sites at under 100ms.
c'mon, mind your R's guys.
Your
During the good old days of networking when I was at Virginia Tech, they had a pretty interesting setup. As far as I understood, VT used to sit on a NAP on the I2. The closer you were to the NAP, the fatter your pipe. There were some plans to open the NAP up for local residental access since most of the Blacksburg residents were students and faculty. I don't know if that was ever accomplished or not.
:-)
:-/
Anyways, before digressing, VT's outgoing pipe had two logical interface. Any packets bound to universites or other educational institutions that had access to the I2 via their local NAP points, would go through the then established oc-3. (The pipe might be fatter now). Any other packets that were bound for networks outside of these destinations were forwarded through the dual t-3 that was used for 'all other traffic'.
I onced did a traceroute to www.ucla.edu from a computer lab on campus during the middle of the day during the middle of the week and got amazing results. I found that there was only 8 hops between that desktop and the webserver that was in CA somewhere and all ping responses were less than 10ms. Talk about insane.
I believe other schools share the same network setup as VT and i wouldn't be surprised many of those once old pipes have now been upgraded to fatter ones. Then again, MCI does have a lot of dark fiber laid around the AMTRAK rails that has yet lit up.
However, despite with all this nice connection, I was recently told by several Virginia Tech on-campus residents that their connection has been capped up. I did some digging around and I believe that CNS is now capping the wall connections with the use of the catalyst 6500 catalysts from Cisco which I belive can limit network usage from reading all their marketing material... lol
Bottom line: Even if your organization or institutions had fat pipes to external networks, if your network capacity is limited from the point where you plug in your RJ45... don't expect to see blazing speeds).
BTW, as far as I know, they got the ports to the residents dorms set up to 10mpbs half duplex... ewwwww......
Will it still be possible to Slashdot I2 servers?
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
I've been living on-campus at a canadian university for 2 years now and only recently discovered how amazing the research network is. (Our regular commercial line is really slow, slow enough to prompt the luckier, and geekyer, residents with TV to get cable internet in addition to the residence internet.)
If you check out the traffic graphs, you can see that well over half the traffic is kazaa. (click on application-bits)
http://205.189.33.73/www/flowscan/nrc.html
Taxpayers' dollars hard at work indeed! The cool thing is that at most times these nodes aren't anywhere near their maximum data transfers at any time that I check them. That's probably just because nobody really knows about it and only use it if they happen to connect to someone else on the network and their university has the routing setup correctly... Also, not all the universities in Canada I've connected to make full use of the network, some limit bandwidth to their users even on this "free" (gov't subsidized) network. From what I hear though, the free part will soon change and the universities/gov't offices will have to pay for it in the upcoming years, but right now it's basically free bandwidth for those on the network.
What is this?!
A univeristy network that is ment for studying and not pr0n trading ? Outrageous!
I wonder if Joe Taxpayer likes the idea that his pennies on the dollar toward education go for through bandwidth...
Ohh, I'd be more than happy if i knew my tax money went to pr0n/gaming bandwith!
All generalizations are false
some limit bandwidth to their users even on this "free" (gov't subsidized) network
Penn State, also part of Internet2, recently imposed similar bandwidth caps (upload speeds of 56K) from dormatory internet connections in response to this problem.
I couldn't agree more on the issue of taxpayer financed networks being "wasted" on private P2P applications instead of being used for the research for which they were originally intended. If so much bandwidth can be given away to subsidize Kazaa, et al., then perhaps I2 could be opened up to private ISPs which could take over some of the costs that various governments are already paying.
Unfortunately, the bandwith caps are the only way the universities will get their research monies worth out of I2.
In case of fire, do not use elevator. Use water!
For those who are curious, here is a map of the PNW gigapop connections that shows where research.microsoft.com and www.microsoft.com is on the internet. Microsoft is on the left, and I2 is on the right.
And for the poster who said Microsoft was not on I2, here is a press release stating that Microsoft was joining I2 in 1999.
Perhaps a technical solution like the Internet2's QBone Scavenger Service can relieve the problem without limits imposed by administrators (although these administrators certainly have a right to impose limits). QBSS is like running nice(1) on Unix: you declare that you're not in a big hurry to get your data and that your traffic can be fit in around more important traffic. Of course, it requires end-user cooperation, but most users of file-sharing apps are capable of respecting the network and making a compromise.
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."
You cannot truly appreciate Dilbert until you read it in the original Klingon.
We use I2 for H.323 Teleconferencing to broadcast symposiums and such from our Sunsite.
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
We have a faculty only network link to the outside world that runs about 60% less than the Student's DS3 (44.2MBps) and I don't think you understand the nature of I2 and what it does. Read the article. Also, unused fibre is a a reality, but isn't a lot of it obsolete pulls? And the real trick isn't getting the dark fiber online, it is convincing shitty companies like Qwest that it needs to be utilized.
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
Yeah this is real cool right up till the point someone hooks some type of scanning laser up to the grid and digitizes a person and sucks em into the grid. Though admittely that wouldn take long to suck the brains of a typical slashdotter up....
Oh wait that was the movie TRON.....
Forget it.....
Sig went tro...aahemmm.....fishing........
It's the same for all nations, if the state uses up tax money to build a really phat backbone local ISPs can make good business and good prices without censorship for the people (the tax payers). Companies get good great access and novel ideas such as IP telephony and video on demand on da net would work better.
More free bandwidth for the people!
If not maybe the universities should find out if he can help them with it. He probably isn't too busy these days.
FoundNews.com - get paid to blog.,
It does TCP resets and is ANOTHER piece of equipment that requires maintenance. Besides all of that functionality is rolling out via Cisco/Extreme/Juniper competing border routers so getting another vendor to deal with is not sense. Also, we tested packeteer and the biggest offenders merely set up VPN links to off-campus and defeated the resetter.
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
It's not a spelling mistake - it's the name of a network. However if you're referring to the (still) uncorrected title of the page - Intenet2 - you'd be right.
Video Game cheats, hints a
ping time is the sum of:
- OS overhead on each end
- transmission time (getting the packet onto the wire at each hop)
- propagation time (getting the bits down the wire)
- queuing delay (waiting for the preceding packets to get through)
A congested link is a link that's dropping packets because it's full. Queuing delay is normal - yes, there's more of it on a congested link, but there will be some queuing delay (on average) even if the link is only 0.001% utilized.
You WILL see an decrease in ping times with multiple connections unless there is ZERO traffic aside from your ping.