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An Application For 10-Gigabit Networking

Posted by timothy on from the moving-pixels-around dept.

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.

4 of 160 comments (clear)

  1. The question remains... by stere0 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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
  2. I've said it before by trybywrench · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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?
  3. Re:This is good... by plumby · · Score: 3, Insightful
    It is 10 gigabit, not 10.6 gigabit. 10.6Gb/s was the speed they got over a PAIR of 10 gigabit ethernet connections.

    No. It's a 10.6 gigabit connection over 2 pairs of 10 gigabit Ethernet interfaces. It doesn't matter how it's made up, the connection speed is the overall speed of the connection.

  4. Re:Game architecture by allanj · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Let's do the math:
    1280x1024 uses 1.25MPixels (that's real Mega as in 2^20) at 32 bpp gives 48MBit/frame. Multiply that with 60 frames/second yields 2880 MBit/second, or just a tad short of 3 GBit/second. That sounds well within the limits, but consider this: Assuming that in a real network this 10 Gbps network will be relatively as efficient as 10 or 100 Mbps networks (some assumption, I know) are right now, you'll get between 30% and 50% of theoretical throughput as the sustained data rate, leaving you with a very narrow margin of bandwidth. And this assumes that you're the ONLY user on the network, which pretty much zeroes out the use for 1280x1024x32bpp, since this is bound to be needed for networked games, which tend to be less than funny when you're the only player.
    But ignoring my assumptions and assuming 100% throughput sustained, you'll get 3 players max - still far less than you're likely to really want.

    --
    Black holes are where God divided by zero