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

There are real world applications...

[panurge]

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.