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16,000 CWRU Computers Getting Gigabit Ethernet
lowlypeon writes "In a move that makes going back to college more tempting than usual, Case Western is installing fiber connections in 16,000 computers over the next year to give students a 1 gigabit per second Ethernet connection. Administrators aren't sure what anybody needs that kind of bandwidth for yet, but they are curious to see how it gets used."
and a bit of a pet peeve.
The name of the school is "Case Western Reserve". I know because I work, teach, and take classes here. Feel free to post your questions about it and I'll do my best to answer.
There's plenty of legal free music and videos out here just look at mp3.com and any film trailers...
I find Broadband is great for the speed of loading webpages and also sharing it with another computer at home at the same time. Dial-up was appalling hen shared between two, especially as I like to load several pages, collect mail and chat on irc all at the same time!
I think that is journalists picking up the word Fiber and misusing it. It is a fiber optic network, just like most other large universities use. The fiber will only go to the GigE switches, which will provide several GigE drops per room. It would not be cost effective to provide 1Gbit fiber (Ethernet or otherwise) to every workstation when copper GigE NICs are so much cheaper.
I had a friend who was attending CWRU in 1992-1993 whose Frat House (!) had fiber to each room. He had a 386 with an ISA card had an AUI port, which had a fiber transceiver attached. It may have only been attached to a 10 megabit hub/switch, but the fiber was there.
My classmate took her PowerMac 7100 to CWRU in the fall of 1994, and she also had to buy a fiber to AUI transceiver to hook up her machine in her dorm room. Strosacker auditorium/lecture hall has had fiber ALN drops readily accessable since the early 90s as well.
So it's my belief that the campus has been wired with fiber for at least 10 years; perhaps they're just upgrading thw switches to Gigabit?
Why did they run fiber that long ago? Well, they had to do SOMETHING with all that technology grant money they were getting for CWRUnet/Cleveland Freenet besides buy modems... plus the $26,000 a year tuition/board costs at the time probably made it easier as well. *Smirk*
-RT (Once known as "Iceman" on CFN, as a teen in the early 90s. Scary.)
SlashSigTheorem: Humorous, Political, Critical, Constructive- If you have a
I work at a University now with Gig to every building. I monitor the links constantly and have never see more then 2 or 3% usage, even to the dorms - Why ...
.02$
Because we have not real apps that use it and our link to the Internet is only Frac-T3.
We even use VoIP and some streaming video tech.
My Advice - By 100M uplinks (Channel if you need more to other buildings) and spend the savings on a better Internet Pipe and applications.
Gig is good for servers, not to a building with 50 people in it, or to a desktop!!!!!
Just my
Well, yes and no. The current off campus connection is equivalent to about an OC-3, with portions for both commodity Internet and Internet 2. I believe the idea is that we'll be increasing those caps and installing additional fiber to connect to the rest of the world. Granted, there will be a bottleneck SOMEWHERE.
;)
The Internet2 is actually going to make a big difference here... cheap costs to hook up host institutions and no need to deal with the hassles of the current crappy commodity Internet. Other Universities will probably follow step, I2 will be upgraded and then it will make a bit more sense.
In any case, the whole upgrade will take about 18 months and we've just gotten started. Students are already set up to go, and the comp-sci buildings are going to be next (I know, because I'm responsible for making sure the upgrades go as smoothly as possible for my users).
Still, I think there's a lot of experimentation to do with the GigE network even if we can only realize those speeds off campus. Will this make us a huge target for DDoS attack machines? Sure, but that's why we try to be proactive in protecting our machines.
Well, I think it's going to be a good idea, too. Previously people had a choice between a shared 10 Mbps network (yes, shared... sloooow) or a 155 Mbps ATM connection (ATM never became the standard we thought it was going to be back in 1994/1995... oh well).
I know students who already have striped RAID arrays (have to hold those research reports on something, eh?) I think, too, that that kind of thing will become more prevalent. There are already some high profile centers on campus that could use the bandwidth... and those folks stuck on the basic 10 Mbps network are going to gladly move up to something faster and actually switched.
As far as off-campus connectivity goes, we have the equivalent of an OC-3, but only handle about 36 Mbps in commodity internet and the rest for Internet 2 (minus about 55 Mbps or so.... the firewall only has 100 Mbps cards or something like that).
In any case, we have plenty of bandwidth to the outside world, but I expect we acquire more as time progresses.
Music won't be shared non-lossy. Sure, the transfers rates may be up, but this didn't have the beneficial side effect of increasing hard drive space. Very few people would be willing to d/l WAVs of CDs instead of MP3s for the extra bit of quality due to the 12x (average for 128bit MP3) file size increase. For now, at least.
Same goes with movies. Right now, a high-quality DiVX run you .5+ gig, and while harddrive sizes are increasing, we have a ways to go before we do straight DVD rips.
And again, we still have limitations of the system itself. Sure, you can run 1Gbps fiber into a 533 Celeron. The typical personal computer can't push 1Gbps through the system, and certainly not through the drives.
Maybe someone will set up a beowulf/distributed.net hybrid, using the low-latency network to set up parallel computing on a dynamic basis (systems going on/offline). It would be interesting to see, and would be great proof-of-concept for autonomous computer projects, like IBM's SMASH (part of Blue Gene).
Well, my .02$US at any rate
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
that story makes it sound like every computer has a gigabit connection to the internet... all they have is a gigabit connection to each other...
sure it'll be great for all those things (full motion this, high definition that), but it's still all INTERNAL to their own network...
I'm guessing they have the standard frac-T3 to connect them to the net... you'll just get to the router faster, and I bet they won't have any lag playing Wolfenstein with each other =P
To everyone who wants to know what all this bandwidth could actually be used for, and why bother if the rest of the internet is generally slower, I have only this to say:
As a Case grad I can inform you that there really is Fibre to every dorm room, class room, etc at Case. It was just running 10mb/s Ethernet when I graduated in '98. This included a fibre optic cable going right up into the computer on a fibre card. My first card in '93 was an AT&T ISA behemoth, going almost the entire length of my case, packed with chips. Now, this doesn't guarantee that they will follow the strategy for gigabit, but if they wasted all that money for fibre for 10mb/s Ethernet, I'd be surprised if they flinched now.
personal attacks hurt, especially when deserved
As a current CWRU student who is currently living in the dorms over the summer and currently has his computer hooked up to the network I can try to clear up any confusion on this =) The network does, indeed, feature fiber running to every desktop. As several individuals have stated previously, the University ran fiber optic cable to every dorm room and office several years back (longer back than I remember). That same fiber is now being used to provide gigabit connections to every room. Every student was (or will be) provided a Netgear GA621 gigabit fiber optic network card for their personal computer, which does, indeed, equate to "fiber to the desktop" =)
They actually ran FDDI (100Mbit over fiber) ten years ago, and put FDDI cards in everyone's PCs.
My guess is that they're using the same fiber, just switching to a Gigabit protocol, since the migration to ATM a few years ago was kinda lame. (Yes, they were doing ATM to the desktop.)
-- Spring: Forces, coiled again!
Well, the fiber has been there since the late 80s, so it's not like we're putting in new fiber. Besides, laptop users will either use 100 Mbps or wireless. I suspect most laptop users will opt for wireless.
Unfortunately, the article doesn't mention wireless at all. A pity.
There's no Cat5 because we already have the fiber network in place. It's been in place since the late 80s for the most part.
It isn't necessarily more fragile (Ever tug too hard on a cat5 cable and have the whole thing come apart?), but, you are right, it tends to be more expensive.
There are a lot of people on here complaining that gigabit just isn't good for anything and no one needs a connection that fast. While I agree that is true in general, there are (non-porn) uses for the connections that universities can really use. For example, I'm a student in an astronomy department. An image from an average-sized digital detector is, oh, 300 MB. Before people start yelling about compression, realize that we have to retain all the information. Of course, this doesn't take into account the fact that there are mosaic cameras that put out a few gigs per image. So, as you can see, a night of 40 images or so can really add up. For us, it makes sense to not only have lots of storage space (mmmmm. . . 1 TB array), but also to have fast connections. We are just starting to experiment with gigabit-over-copper now, and I must say that, so far, it seems to be totally worth it. Having to wait 30 seconds for an image to display on your screen (because it's stored on the disk array at the other end of the office) is a huge pain.
So, I'm not saying that CWRU needs to wire all of their dorms, but gigabit certainly makes sense in some areas.
I couldn't tell if you were experimenting with poor-man's cryogenics or looking for the orange sherbet.
- The article isn't clear about the fiber networking here at CWRU. The fiber network has been in place largely since the late 1980s. This isn't a new installation. New buildings are getting both Cat5 and fiber, but most of the older buildings already have both single and multi mode fiber already installed. Cat5 wasn't even a standard until after the current fiber infrastructure was already in place!
- Yes, the name of the school is Case Western Reserve University.
- CWRU implemented an ATM network in 1995/1996 that failed miserably. I know because I was one of the first people on it. At the time, ATM was an unproven technology. Vendor support just wasn't there. Gigabit is less of a gamble because we know it works and has much better support and a much brighter future.
- The article does not mention anything of the thousands upon thousands of wireless access points that will be installed as well. While 802.11 certainly does not provide anywhere near the performance of a wired connection, most laptop users will probably find the wireless network more useful in the long run
- CWRU isn't the greatest school in the world, but I know that the many people, including myself, work tireless to try to make it better. There are many bitter people (and rightly so) out there who have had negative experiences with the school in the past. However, things have changed and are continuing to move in a very positive direction. I know because I'm living it.
- Presti's is still open and they still sell delicious bakery.
OK... enough ranting for now. I'm going to hop out of this discussion. If anyone has any serious questions, they can email me. I can't guarantee I'll know the answer, but I'll certainly try.You can netboot windows. An "nfsroot" windows is a different story.