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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.
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.
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
Great, then someone driving by could steal all of your MP3s in under a minute.
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.
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.
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.
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.