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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.

6 of 160 comments (clear)

  1. On a more serious note... by bruthasj · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  2. There are real world applications... by panurge · · Score: 5, Interesting
    A big area of technological growth is digital printing. Currently A3 color digital page printers run up to about 2000 sheets per hour. A full 2-page image for one of these babies is potentially over 300Mbit, which means gigabit/s networking is already needed between the data source and the rip to get full performance. Before digital presses can reach the sizes reached by plate technology presses, 10Gb/s will surely be needed.

    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.
  3. "Real-world scientific application" by po8 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  4. Re:The possibilities are endless by WoofLu · · Score: 2, Interesting

    uh? What's the relation between ethernet an internet?

    You could have a 10Gbit/s pipe to your ISP, although I'm not sure if they would be able to handle that ..

  5. Multimedia: video, large scans by alienmole · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Places that deal with a lot of multimedia can use this bandwidth - easily. Medical applications, such as high-resolution digital xrays and CAT scans, can generate enormous volumes of data which can take ages to push around - sneakernet is still sometimes the easiest/quickest way. Then there's video - anyone doing rendering and editing of video can use this.

    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.

  6. There are plenty of real world applications by Sycraft-fu · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.