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.

Comments

Re:I'm not that impressed

[alienmole]

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.

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.