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An Application For 10-Gigabit Networking
Chip Smith sent us a short excerpt from a news article on Supercomputing Online:
"Just yesterday Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and several key partners put together a demonstration system running a real-world
scientific application to produce data on one cluster, and then send
the resulting data across a 10 Gigabit Ethernet connection to another
cluster, where it is then rendered for visualization." Here's the link to follow if you'd like to read more on this experiment.
grant was first but then nooooooo
Their first project is to create a virtual dictionary and spell checker so that the Slashdot editors make sure that their posts to the front page are spelled properly. As an added bonus, it'll even check grammar! Unfortunately, the scientists aren't sure if there's enough bandwidth available yet to correct all the mistakes.
You're only as smart as your brain.
let me guess "that real world applicatin" was setting up "victim server" on one send, and "emulated slashdot attack" on another end.
I can get by just fine without 10-gigabit networking. All I haveta do is wait longer for the data!
[/typical_karmawhoring_kneejerk_reaction]
"Derp de derp."
This experiment shortly followed by a another showing how fast they could move MP3 collections
Jesus saves souls and redeems them for valuable cash prizes
Can you imagine the pings on game servers for Quake3 or counterstrike? 0 to 1 tops!
this is sick. someone remove it
BEOWULF! Say it with me now...
Saying "10 gigabit ethernet" is like saying that a tennis player serve can reach 160 km (when you mean 160 km/h).
"On June 17th it was announced that the final milestone in the IEEE standards approval process was reached last week when the IEEE 802.3ae specification for 10 Gigabit Ethernet was approved as an IEEE standard by the IEEE Standards Association (IEEE-SA) Standards Board."
Is it just me, or is the abbreviation 'IEEE' appears a lil' bit too much in that paragraph?
Who would use 10 Gbit ethernet apart from routers and labs? I know about Moore's law but I also know that 10 Gbit throughput on my hard disk is not coming soon.
Trollem mirabilem hanc subnotationis exigiutas non caperet
Think of the porn I can download now! er, [notices significant other in room] think of the amount of data I could research and the time I'd save....
It's like Intel coming out and saying they're going to release a 3.0GHz next year some time. It's the next logical step.
Now of course this is better than what we have now, but look at the experiment they did. They sent gigabytes of data across the wire so it can be processed and rendered on another machine. Wouldn't it be just as easy to process the data on the originating machine and just send the bitmap over. You can see the image in the background of the photos in the article. It's mostly blue with a spot of green in the middle.
I know somebodies going to chime in about how the data they sent isn't as important as how fast they sent it. But just think about these guys being some of the smartest in the world and they can't come up with a decent test other than what amounts to be a poorly designed client/server setup. It would be like having a server send the whole accounting database down to the client just so the CFO can pull up the details of a single transaction. That's not a practical application for that bandwidth.
I can't think of a practical situation, but if somebody could explain why you would need to send a gigabyte of data in one second vs. 8 second I'd be more impressed.
If I get ahold of this 10.6 Gigabit connection, I'll be able to get all my pr0n downloaded in a matter of days instead of months!
in case you didn't notice, you got credit all the way through!
would be running a phat VNC cvonnection in your home... wireless 10Gb would be even better, wander around with what amounts to a dummy terminal VNCed to some massive tower. I'd like a cluster of Mac towers serving to a TiBook with lots of ram and video ram and most of the other stuff like the HD stripped away, to keep the price down-ish.
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
Why'd you bother posting that? It's offtopic and trite.
Put some heart into your troll.
As my father lik@(munch munch)...
What I really want to know is how many LOC's (Library of Congress) this is per second....
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Network traffic doesn't increase at the same rate over time as do RAM requirements, processor requirements, video card requirements, etc.
"I don't know that atheists should be considered citizens, nor should they be considered patriots." - George Bush
10 gig Ethernet is a big problem for all the ATM folks out there. IP6/10Gig Ethernet is a big big problem for ATM. Now carriers have the option of going straight Ethernet throughout the backbone. You say "what about QOS?" well.. IP6 has those bases covered.
Rest In Peace ATM
I came to the datacenter drunk with a fake ID, don't you want to be just like me?
10.6 gigabits is the expected evolution in networking technology. Take a look at the engineers' picture; How about an evelution in fashion and not wearing socks with sandals. That would be impressive.
This reminds of reading about Neural Nets in the various texts on Artificial Intelligence. They always quote Shepherd and Koch 's "The Synaptic Organisation of the Brain": "The brain incorporates 10 billion neurons and 60 trillion connections."
When I think about these new network technologies I can't help to think it's our connections that we lack these days. Hopefully with more and more advanced technology we can utilize these connections to create things more intelligent. This appears to be on the right track.
Maybe "Jane" will finally come out of the closet. Well, actually we got to have Instantaneous (sp) communication before that happens... Doh, well... we're making slight progress.
beowulf cluster of these. Dear god - that's almost relevant. Strike that.
This sounds nice. The jump from 10 megabits to 100 megabits in the home office was a very substantial improvement. Moving 60 - 100 megabyte scans between machines is much more tolerable.
And all from a 10 times improvement. This 10 gigabit/sec network is 100 times faster.
It will come down to the disk storage. My 100 megabit network already has me waiting on hard disk reads and writes, so I'm not sure if I'd see any more benefits if this were available now.
"The Slashdot Staff Discovers Networking" - Film
.. circa 1980 BBS's?
at 11.
i swear, the quality of accepted submissions
around here decreases exponentially over time.
"Just yesterday Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and several key partners put together a demonstration system running a real-world scientific application to produce data on one cluster, and then send the resulting data across a 10 Gigabit Ethernet connection to another cluster, where it is then rendered for visualization."
Good Christ on a Cubesteak - "Just Yesterday LBNL
sends data from one node to another node so that
node can display the data."
They re-discovered what
You people.
jesus.
LBL, isn't that where Van Jacobson worked on the BSD networking stack?
And, if that's boring, think about the military applications. In order to try and cut costs and save on code duplication, the labs are building systems in which part of the application (the secret part) runs on secure systems, whereas non-secret parts run on machines using commercial code. Having a single physical pipe between the areas rather than, as at present, multiple pipes could make the security setup a lot easier, and make the design of the machine considerably cheaper. We will all sleep a lot more securely knowing that LL is able to design lots of new exciting kinds of nuclear weapon at minimal cost.
By the way, if they use any GPLed software, does that mean they have to release the entire source code for the application? Just a question.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
So is this fast enough to send me a 1280x1024x32bpp image sixty times a second?
Wallhack THIS.
Yahoo! Pipes are awesome. How awesome? http://pipes.yahoo.com/jesdynf/slashdot
On the surface it would seem if the two clusters were approximatly the same you could have them working on projects in parallel rather than in serial. That is, just get it to render it itself and let the other cluster do the same on another project, won't have to waste time sending/receiving data either (how ever much reduced).
Must be the middle of the night, because I'm struck by the beautiful improbability of the phrase "real world scientific [computing] application". Looking at the article, I note that the phrase is stolen from it, and that the article also mentions that the app is "Cactus". Looking at the pages for that project, I note that Cactus is a computational framework, not an actual application. Further, there seems to be no indication which app was actually run.
However, most of the Cactus apps seem to be in astrophysics. Sigh. Maybe it's "real-world" astrophysics. Or maybe it's just bedtime.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I don't wanna blow my own horn here, this article sounds remarkably similar to something I was doing years ago. Back around '98 or so, I was writing code for my local Uni's chemistry department...the code took 3D visualization data from the professor's SGI workstations, and transparently submitted them to an SGI super across campus for calculation. Sort of trivial when you get down to it... It doesnt require enormous loads of bandwidth to be able to generate a whole chain of proteins, and visualize locally whats actually being crunched half a mile away.
Cheers,
Bowie J. Poag
Peer to Car networking?!
Brilliant! Better pattent it now. = )
Wonder why they didn't go for a SAN solution, so first cluster writes to a volume on the SAN, and the second cluster just reads the data from the SAN, rather than squirting huge files across an IP network?
The throughput from a single hard disk is not that important: in these environments, RAID arrays (typically fiber channel) optimized for read performance allow overall disk performance at e.g. 1.6Gbps. If you have multiple such servers on your network, with many workstations trying to get at the data, 1Gbps Ethernet starts looking a little slow, especially for the backbones.
The main one is for large networks. If you have a large network, gig or dual gig may just not be enough for connections to your major layer-3 switches. Well till now, gig was all you could do on the eithernet spec, you had to go with something like packet-over-sonet to get more bandwidth. 10GigE is nice because you can keep the whole network eithernet, but get more bandiwdth.
At the university where I work I'm sure we'll start using this sonner rather than later. Right now all our distribution routers have dual gig connections to the two backbone routers. Fine, escept that each is feeding 20 to 50 buildings at 100mb each and the redundant set we are going to add will probably be gig. Those gig links to the backbone will fill up fast if each building has a gig to play with. Hence, 10gig eithernet is great since it works with our existing switches and setup, only faster.
Really, desktop or even server use is not the main target of this at least not for a few more years. The main target is removing bottlenecks from the network that supplies those servers.
First relevant beowulf cluster post, ever!!!
No body else has mentioned it so I will... the article mentions that its running two Linux clusters!
Quake3/Unreal/Counterstrike
Ultimate geek frag fest!
---
I support spreading santorum
Wow. It must have taken some genius to think of this kind of application! Transfer large amounts of data in high bandwidth, who could have thought of such a brilliant idea!?
there are numerous applications for this.
:)
first is the transmission of audio/video specifically hdtv. an uncompressed hdtv 1080i transmission will use up 1.5gbps (a single ge is not enough to transmit.) so it takes only 6 transmissions to saturate the bandwidth.
second, the main function of 10ge right now is for long haul transmission. 10ge is a very cheap way of increasing the data transfer in a single fiber without the expensive sonet/sdh multiplexers. you can simply rent a dark fiber from your telco and buy a 10ge kit and walla! create your own 10ge man. note that a typical oc192/stm64 9.6gbps is very much expensive to deploy.
third, intel has already released a 10ge server adapter!!! (i don't remember the url, just search it through their website.) with the advent of pci-x 64bit/133mhz, infiniband 4x, you can plug it in and deliver 10ge from the server. (that is you must have a really fast hdd farm.)
fourth, 10ge will fall to the desktop in probably 8 years time. so probably right now, they are working on 40ge or 100ge (if they keep the 10x multiplier thing.)
and fifth, 10ge will enable you to download all the porn and mp3 in a jiffy!
Live your life each day as if it was your last.
okay.. I havent' read the 10Gbit standard, so I'm sort of talking out my ass.. but...
if it follows the way 10 & 100 worked..
This is another one of those "Why you can't transmit at 10Gbs from a single computer over 10Gbps ethernet" posts.
First, realize that the 'speed' of ethernet reflects the maximum use of the broadcast medium at maximum capacity. A medium designed for multiple conversations going on at once.
Example: There is a mandatory 9.6 microsecond gap between attemps to transmit frames on the ethernet (this is a minimum limit). In 10Mbps, this is 96 bits worth of time. In 100, it's 960.. if they do the same in 1000, tht's 9600 bits.
So think of that as a per-frame penalty.
If the frame size stays the same.. the mandatory inter-frame gap is about 6 times the size of the data payload now. (okay, so maybe it's different now..). If this IS the case... what's the point of of 10Gbps? More hosts, no switches. That's right.
Bandwidth is the cure for switching.
This isn't science. Its engineering. There is a difference people.
Another group of users that need this bandwidth are network operators/backbone carriers. As expensive as 10 Gbps Ethernet is, it's still a lot cheaper than a Sonet or ATM solution of the same speed, and much more suited to connecting routers and switches together in a colo / switch center.
Besides, it's not that far from regular data centers either. Servers typically come with gigabit cards these days, and you need to be able to aggregate all these gigabit connections somehow. Clustering, backups, database duplication etc. all benefit from big pipes.
Wait I thought Liverence Livermore was a
;
scientific organization but this is foo foo
engineering ?
Didnt bell labs do 10 trillion bits/sec.
article is on the 3D Volume Holographic Optical
website at
http://colossalstorage.net/colossal.htm
Just as you can logically bundle 8 fastethernet ports (Fast Etherchannel in Cisco) and you can make 8 Gig ports into one big pipe (Gigachannel) I wonder when we will be able to put together 8 10 GigE ports to make 80 Gig! Now that is a backbone! That is double the speed of the not yet released OC-768.
Sorry I am just one of those guys who likes Big Pipes.
AndyMcL (speed junkie)
You need to go the other way with your decimal points.
.96 bit times .096 bit times .0096 bit times
10 Mb 96 bit times
100 Mb
GigE
10 GigE
Also do not forget that anything not half duplex does not use CSMA/CD so it is not a shared medium.
This could include all of the speeds above.
There is a thing called jumbo frames that takes into account that faster speeds such as GigE and 10 GigE links will never be used in a shared network (other parts down the line may be but not the links that they are connected to) they allow for much larger frame sizes. The upper limit for 10Base-T and 100-BaseTX, because of backwards compatibility, is 1518 bytes long. If you make the fame size larger then you get a higher goodput. Goodput is the percentage of actual data sent in relation to bandwidth taken up by headers. Right now different vendors implement jumbo frames in their own proprietary manner because the IEEE did not make a spec for it in GigE and now 10 GigE. I think that Extreme uses something like 9,000 bytes and Cisco uses 25,000 bytes long frames. I am probably wrong on the exact numbers but just giving you an idea.
So basically 10 GigE is very fast and does not have any extra burdens because of IPG (interpacket gap).
AndyMcL
You could have 100 Gbps, even 1000 GBps and ping could not get better not even by one.
;-P
Although there are techniques to use bandwidth to reduce ping, generically speaking ping times between USA and Germany would still suck even at these hugh speeds.
Use pushlatency.
If you want to see want is possible in science with similar networks, check the demos planned for the iGrid conference, in September: iGrid. Especially with the coming optical transatlantic link between Amsterdam and Chicago at 2.5Gb/s.
Luc.