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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.
ping would very much stay the same you could just run more copies of quake on the 10 gbit network
It is logically the next step in the evolution of networking, but it currently outstrips even the memory bandwidth of most systems. Even gigabit today is rarely necessary. In both cases, even if you don't use anywhere near your full bandwidth, you still win if you are using more than the 10 times slower generation provides. There are still, however, some compelling applications that immediately present themselves.
As an uplink between network switches, more bandwidth is always needed. This is what was done in the experiment. If you can't imagine a network that busy, consider switches with 256 100MB ethernet ports, or only a few gigabit ports. It is always better, if it all possible, to be able to guarantee that the switch uplink will never become a bottleneck. If they need to do this with many gigabit ports today, be it ethernet or fibre channel, it is done by using multiple gigabit uplinks.
In any cluster where there is substantial communcation between the nodes, more bandwidth and less latency is always useful. Sufficiently low latency and high bandwidth makes many types of computation feasible that would not otherwise be feasible. Shared memory within a cluster can always benefit from decreased latency. A cluster is always better (meaning VASTLY cheaper and VASTLY more reliable) than a many-many CPU system. Anything that makes the cluster nodes seem closer together will make it easier to move existing software onto cluster-based systems.
It is 10 gigabit, not 10.6 gigabit. 10.6Gb/s was the speed they got over a PAIR of 10 gigabit ethernet connections.
You're thinking point-to-point, but that's not what networks are for. Imagine the backbone at a hospital with CAT scanners, MRIs, xrays all generating digital images, and doctors around the hospital accessing a database of those images. 10Gbps isn't enough for applications like this. My local dentist's office uses digital xrays, and they complain about the 1Gbps on their little LAN - and they probably don't have more than about 15 workstations.
And as someone else mentioned, rendering and editing of digital video uses up even more bandwidth. You don't have to be Pixar to need to do stuff like this - many companies in the media business can use this.
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.