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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 they thought they were having a problem with file sharing before .....
Tis better to be silent and thought a fool, than to open your mouth and remove all doubt --Abraham Lincoln
Fiber or Ethernet?
Token ring FDDI or 1000BaseT?
Would be nice to have a dorm full of fiber.
Get paid to code OSS
the same way everyone else does... music, porn, and games.
--
Don't sweat the petty things, and don't pet the sweaty things.
how to user 1Gb/sec??
the joys of peer-to-peer of course!!
h357
Being mature educated college students i'm sure this bandwidth will be used for nothing other than strict educational purposes.
I can finally use the Gigabit ethernet card in my PowerMac!
http://www.apple.com/powermac/
--
Don't sweat the petty things, and don't pet the sweaty things.
give students a 1 gigabit per second Ethernet connection...
/Smuffe
Oh boy, this is gonna be fun. Hopefully the medical students watching surgery in real time wont bother too much about the constant reboots because of kiddies running 31337 DDOS attacks at each other....
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.
no one else in any non-commercial environment is going to have this kind of bandwidth to push content, so there should be a massive bottleneck, right? so where exactly is the good of this. you have a ton more bandwidth, but everyone else's bandwidth is the same so you still can't really get content any faster... where is broadband for the masses when you need it?!?
Satanists get good grades too...suspiciously good grades
It's sad what admins will convince businesses and colleges to do just to get ahead in the SETI ratings.
Never confuse volume with power.
well, I think you are confusing Bandwidth to the internet with intra-lan bandwidth. They have gigabit speeds to connect to each other with, but not to the outside world.
If some folks were smart, they would try to do two things:
1. Set up VoIP systems. This might kill their telephone bills. Who knows? Find a way to make VoIP work, work, work.
2. Set up wireless hubs everywhere in the area. See how people get creative with the access. Always on, always fast. Yum!
How to Download YouTube Videos
At least they'll have little lag issues with Quake, and one can really find out who the fastest gun in the west is. Or at least the Case Western! (I'm just not sure how Cleveland, OH is considered part of the west....)
Awk! Pieces of eight. Pieces of eight. Pieces of seven... ERROR: General Protection Fault. [Paroty Error.]
This is intereresting but not that all unexepected --- Case has always been on the cutting edge of networking technology. I almost ended up going to school there just because they already have ATM Fiber conncetions in all the rooms already (155Mb/sec IIRC). Gigabit ethernet in itself is interesting because I Don't know of any hard drives that can actually move 100 megabytes a second conitinuously, but I'm sure it will catch up one day. I wouldn't be surprised if students started building RAID striping arrays just to get the bandwidth up.
On another note, the article doesn't seem to mention the speed of the actual internet hookup. Anyone know what they have over there? If they haven't upgraded that, then the whole thing won't seem any faster than 10-base-T when using the net.
Won't this really only be useful for the people on campus, even if someone in New York had an equivalent HS connection because of the inherent bottlenecks that exists on the current internet.
~ kjrose
Administrators aren't sure what anybody needs that kind of bandwidth for yet, but they are curious to see how it gets used.
Isn't is obvious? Pirated movies, pirated games, porn, pirated music, more porn...
Oh, did I mention porn?
yes mom... I'm taking care of myself... I get enough fiber...
:-)
Porn.
Duh.
At this point in time, the only files that 99 out of 100 college students use that take up enough space to justify this kind of throughput are illegal.
I know that they're installing this to be ready for future needs when they happen, but all they're doing for the near future is insuring that the kids won't have to pay for Warcraft 3.
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
at college. I'm sure that it's very important for Case to have a "leg up" on the bigger universities but is this going to produce better educated students? The teacher can control lights, sound system and link to the web....oh boy. I'm not dismissing the importance of research at universities but damn, isn't 100 mb networking enough for most dorm computers? Wouldn't the money they're spending on this be better spent elsewhere because $400/student isn't going to cover their costs!? The only possible use I can see for this is porn, warez, etc, etc, etc. Although maybe someone could scan one of those $200, 50 page paperback textbooks and make it available....
Why run fiber instead of 1000Base-T ? Sure for points outside the 100M limitation you will have to go Fiber, but the rest will make a lot more sense going 1000Base-T.
27 million is a lotta moola to pay for "lets just see what they actually use it for."
Imagine 10,000 Hackers ( ahm, college students) hacking away at the internet via gigabit! And some folks complain about the ./ effect now!
Running a server isn't illegal with my cable co (NTL in the UK)
And the people shall be oppressed, every one by another, and every one by his neighbour Isaiah 3:5
Non-starters:
I guess for a while we'll just see Fasttrack and Gnutella used to distribute movies... How utterly boring.
-- Stanislav Shalunov
makes going back to college more tempting than usual
Sorry, but personally, fast internet connections don't rate quite as highly as 18 year old girls...
"Administrators aren't sure what anybody needs that kind of bandwidth for yet, but they are curious to see how it gets used."
Those guys are so fired when the system crashes =)
now if only my computer's internal bus speed was that fast...
Ok lets take this recipe
:)
College students.
Computers.
Gigabit eth0 interface.
Porn.
Warez.
Muzic.
And these "ADMINISTRATORS" dont yet know how the bandwith is going to be utilized ?!?!?!
I think someone is asleep at the wheel. Or just dosent have a clue what college students are all about. I mean sure, some will be running spatial simulations of the end of time on their gigabit beowulf cluster that geek squad 101 puts togeter on this network and all that acedemia but, but how about the most kick ass perr to peer network know to man ?
I wonder if they'll pu that in the brocures
I am curios what type of traffic shaping and filtereing they are going to do on the campuses in and outbound pipe to the net ?
Sig went tro...aahemmm.....fishing........
No you don't:
In all, 16,000 computers, including machines in every dorm room, will be linked over the coming year to a fiber-optic network that delivers data at up to one gigabit per second.
I want to meet the sales guy that sold them the switches.
How much does GigE run per port? $500?
hmm... for fun I enjoy launching DDoS attacks against 127.87.42.5
Case Western Reverse University,
at least when I went there. aka See double, you are you.
Are the Spitwad and the Fountain still in the quad? Is Presti's Donuts still in business, and are the Best Cinnamon Rolls in the known universe still available there at 1:15 AM?
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
I'm guessing you're not a big fan of **multiplayer gaming**? You pretty much need broadband to play.
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!
The RIAA has struck yet again, this time seizing every non-Apple computer at Case Western Reserve. When questioned why they did not confiscate any Apple computers the RIAA stated, " Well, lets put it this way, Steve's nickname around here is Hand"
"Administrators aren't sure what anybody needs that kind of bandwidth for yet, but they are curious to see how it gets used"
I am interested to find out how the administrators will find out how the links are being used. What hardware/software has the power to track this level of traffic on a switched network.
Will they be using integrated RMON2 NAM cards in the switches or possibly analysis of Netflow data from the routers.
However they do it there will be a geat deal of data to crunch
slashnik
The network administration folks at CWRU have some very clueful geeks (used bash lately?), but when I left, there were never enough of them. All this fancy new hardware will do the university little good unless they give the people running it enough budget to do a first-rate job.
Looks like they could put something like seek42 to good use! It kicks ass here at Rolla where it was written by a current student, and I'm sure with a network 1000 faster that ours they would surely enjoy it, especially if their pipe the the rest of the internet isn't gigabit.
With my college it doesn't matter how much bandwidth they throw at us it eventually gets used somehow. So much they put filters during parts of the day so the library can actually get online.
:)
Hopefully it won't all go to kazaa
Doing just a quickie calculation the switches alone would be 1.6 M (100 / port) and I bet it will be way more than that since I based the 100 / port on an 8 port linksys.
Seems like a very expensive experiment.
...what the hell for? I'm the netadmin at Unv and I'm fighting to not run GigE to all my buildings. It simply isn't needed here. I can't imagine running GigE to the desktop. They must have a helluva lot of grant money to waste. The nic cards along aren't cheap. A 3c996 SX card runs about $475 at discount. Are they expecting the users to go out and buy them? That card doesn't have Mac drivers either. I wonder if they expect new Mac users that already have 10/100/1000 to waste a PCI slot for a 1000Base-SX nic. This is just plain weird. I wonder what they connect the building to the campus with... One thing it does do is give the users more than enough umph to DoS most modern processors. It also gives them more than enough umph (if they connect to the campus LAN at say 10GigE to DoS their server farm firewall or worse yet, the actual server. Wanna fill the queue on their I1/I2 border router? Here GigE kids; go have fun.
So how much more will tuition cost? Will it be proportional to the bandwidth used?
This SIG pulled due to lack of funding. (This damn war is costing too much!)
As far as I know, most every switch vendor sells gigabit copper ports, and the spec runs over Cat 5/Cat 5e wire as a rule, no Cat6 required.
My personal experience with fiber has been that it's lovely stuff when you need to avoid EM interference or go farther than 300 meters, but dust on the connections can be a big problem. The idea of fiber to the desktop with users constantly plugging in and removing SC patch cords gives me fits of anxiety.
Although now that I read the article a bit more closely, it doesn't seem at all clear that the fiber is going to each and every desktop as lowlypeon seems to imply. My guess is these 16000 computers will actually get gigabit copper NICs and the backbone will be fiber.
. We've got computers, we're tapping phone lines, you know that ain't allowed - Talking Heads, "Life During Wartime"
seems a bit expensive to me.
I work at an Interoperability Lab, and the manager of the gigabit ethernet consortium said the cost per port on the machines would be about $300 apiece. (Not only the fiber NIC's but also the switches). This is going to cost about $5 million to just interface with the fiber.
But I wouldn't mind if UNH had gigabit ethernet, I can just imagine the abuse.
It's all good.
Yes he will. He'll just have to use a transceiver. *shrug*. Copper is yucky, anyways, especially for installations as large as this.
Living in an all Computer Engineering floor, I can tell you what it's going to be used for:
1) Downloading pr0n
2) Counterstrike
3) Getting Porn
4) Downloading every episode of every season of every Star Trek series ever made (including the animated one)
5) Hosting Porn
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
Geek: we have figured out how to get porn 1 million times faster
Marge: who needs that much porno?
Homer: (drools)...ooohhh yyyeea one million times faster.
$cat
Finally we can play Half-Life over VNC!
It is hard to justify such a significant investment on edge connectivity unless all of the core network functions can handle the load. For 1Gbps bandwidth to actually be useful, all of this bandwidth must be aggregated back somewhere and all of the other shared network functions must also be geared for this incredible bandwidth.
For example, the connection from the campus to the Internet is a bottleneck. If the campus has 45 Mbps to the Internet and this must be shared by everyone, then, as a practical matter, no one will get more then his/her share of the 45 Mbps no matter how much bandwidth his/her desktop is capable of handling.
To take advantage of the speed, you need to invest in a backbone capable of handling all of this bandwidth (so that it is not oversubscribed and therefore irrelevant), sufficient internet capacity, large servers (with 10 Gbps NICs) and a lot of other infrastructure.
Additionally, few laptops will be fast enough to take advantage of the Gbps speed. I doubt whether a PCMCIA adapter can support the throughput required.
The ability to use Voice over IP and streaming video is nice, but can be done over a 100 Mbps pipe. Additionally, the "coolness" factor will probably serve the University's marketing well. Additionally, it probably means that the University will have more years before required upgrades. However, I do not see the justification for this.
My old school (UTD) laughed at the idea of giving us 100mbps!
Gotta have wireless 'cause it's so cool!
pr0n, mp3s, avis, vobs, warez ... the usual
Obviously they will start out using the usual suspects, but if the bandwidth is sufficient, I suspect that these boring old illegimate uses will evolve into more interesting illegimate and legimate uses.
Perhaps sharing entire music collections at once, or developing a good P2P TV sharing system. Maybe high resolution webcams and intra-dorm video conferencing. I think it will be interesting to see the communities and cultural shifts that emerge from this kind of concentrated bandwidth. Mini-cultural shifts from some of the above examples might include 'Dorm TV', with a floor or individual rescheduling (and retransmitting) distributely stored TV programs to fit in with classes, along with some ripped movies and home-made messages thrown into the mix. Also, in an age of reality shows, access to higher resolution web-cams/video conferencing might generate totally different perspectives on privacy, especially within an enviroment where students are already likely to share rooms, showers, and eating areas. Like those first exposed to e-mail and the web, these students will surely have different attitudes and higher expectations when they move out and begin work.
Total speculation on my part, but high bandwidth should take us well beyond mp3's and warez, making this a very interesting experiment indeed. The big question will be how this use is monitored (traffic or anecdotal) and if the university/provider will step in prematurely to stop illegal or suspect use, since so much of the ultimately interesting (and even legimate uses) are likely to sprout from initial hacks for illegimate use.
My next sig will be ready soon, but friends can beat the rush!
Having graduated from CWRU a few years ago, I still visit the campus and sit in on meetings that discuss campus improvements. I was only informed of this technology at the end of this past school year and was, as can be expected, astounded... and also a little jealous of my younger brother who is still going to school there.
In the meeting we were informed that a deal was struck with Sprint and that "in the near future" (possibly 2 or 3 years) they plan on setting up the entire campus with wireless connectivity. Not only will the students' computers be wired, but plans have discussed to get a mobile phone to every student; so rather than have a phone for each room, each student would get a phone now. (And since people that go to school there know that Sprint service currently sucks, I'm sure they will be installing a tower or two on campus as well.)
Plans were also discussed on having all data to-and-from dormrooms be wired through this network within the near future. (All computer network, wire-based phone system, television, etc...)
Karma: NaN
Administrators aren't sure what anybody needs that kind of bandwidth for yet, but they are curious to see how it gets used."
I guess that's what they'll say when the BSA comes a knockin at their door.
Want to use a VPN so you can work from home easily? Legal.
Want to watch streaming concerts and keynotes of big events? Maybe view videos of your classes? Legal.
Want to have a decent ping on game servers? Legal.
Want to download the latest 200MB game demo in a matter of minutes? Legal.
Want to try videoconferencing with your loved ones to save phone bills? Legal.
If you can't think of legal uses for broadband, then maybe you're one of those people that's content to stick with a dial-up modem.
It's quite possible to be doing nasty things affecting lots of people without ever moving outside your LAN. There are about a dozen colleges on campus at the University I work for, and earlier this year we had an incident where a single student had trojaned himself onto lots of machines and used them all in a DDoS against a student at another college. Unfortunately the other college's network infrastructure was less than perfect and that childish little prank knocked the entire college offline for a weekend.
it sounds like everyone thinks they're getting a gigabit to the internet, seems to me like they're getting a gigabit only acrossed campus, how useful can that really be? now we all can have our own UT servers?
--fetch daddy's blue fright wig, i must be handsome when i release my rage
Since this is going to be pretty expensive for what is effectively a survey, why not just ask students to fill out a proper survey saying what they'd use the bandwidth for? Just add in some of the methods for privacy discussed here and you'll have an idea of what students use bandwidth for without the expense of installing it. It wouldn't cost more than a few thousand dollars to carry it out, way cheaper than putting in fiber connections and Ethernet.
Note to M1-ers: a curt but otherwise insightful message is not "Flamebait" or "Troll".
In related news the university has also been sued by the RIAA. In a writen statment the spokesman for the RIAA said "Of course were sueing What the hell else do you think theyll use that network for besides stealing our intelectual property."
This suit is the first in a series of legal actions that the RIAA hopes will solve the P2P dilema. The longterm goal of the law suits is to return everyone to 9600kbps modems or as the same spokesman was quoted saying "If users cant handel the responsibility that comes with a broadband connection we'll have to limit it to corpate america, the last bastion of trust and integrity in america today."
--aiee
It's actually a test to see how many people connect their computer to their dorm phone line and sell Internet access over the university system!!
And it's done by ALIENS!!! ALIENS!!!
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
Where I work, we just got around to upgrading the network from 10BaseT to 100BaseT. Things did get faster -- but not ten times as fast. In a few extreme cases, apps that transfer umpteen megabytes in a short span were maybe 2 or 3 times as fast. Fifty percent was more typical.
I can simultaneously stream 2 DivX movies and 2 mp3s around my house with a mere 100mbps lan (only 4 boxes now) - why would anybody need more? Serving uncompressed DVDs? It'll be a loooong time before I need any more bandwidth. Hell, broadband internet access tops out at 10mbps (on a good day). What's the point? Pure science? Not a troll, please enlighten me.
OK, then, what's a Reserve University? Is it anything like a Junior University? As in Leland Stanford Junior University.
Case was once famous for doing the wrong thing really well. Just as interactive computing started to work, Case developed one of the best batch operating systems of the era. This was so cost-effective that it kept Case studends on punched cards much later than other comparable schools. The entire school ran on a 1 MIPS machine, with enough free time to support a private company selling excess time to commercial users.
this is what many people don't understand:
some of the strange priorities of universities stems from dedicated donations: the university must BY CONTRACT use the money from a specific donation in a specific way.
so, if someone decided to give a donation for such a specific project, it doesn't matter that the money would be 100X time more usefull in adding to the local library, since they can't use the money that way.
it's a pitty, because many times the sexy subjects are by far not the effective ones.
Working for necessity's mother.
"a. run insecure unix machines that are often used in DDOS attacks."
yes, we all know how inadequate UNIX machines often feel.
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
Just letting you know that you are correct. Fiber has been layed out all over the campus for quite a while. (I started there in 1994 and fiber was already everywhere.) And it is EVERYWHERE. Computer labs, dorms, fraternity/sorority houses, lecture halls, classrooms, libraries, and I even believe some food courts. They are not (from what I have been informed) currently installing any fiber; they are just replacing the switches in each building. They already started with some dorms and Greek houses a month or so ago and promised to have all student housing completed by the beginning of this coming school year.
Karma: NaN
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:
This smells like BS. Why run fiber? Why not Copper? What type of back-end are they running(Cisco, Nortel)? What computer can keep up with a 100/Mbits? Has anyone ever seen a system that can handle full duplex connections? Bandwidth doesn't solve problems, created by man.
.....must...not state...obvious.... .......Arrrrrrrrrrggggggghhhh!
(snap)
Wow! Can you image the Beowulf cluster they could set up with this???
Sounds like a backbone for Sony's Cell Computing.
Well, except 100Mbits networks can support such activity without any problem. You can even feed a decent video stream over 10Mbit. Or 2.5Mbit DSL. Video conferencing could have taken off at any point the last three decades. It hasnt happened. That you cant transmit 'full motion, full screen high definition' Just Aint The Problem. It just isnt interesting or practical for most people. It isnt interesting or practical in low res, nor is it interesting or practical in high definition. And for the JenniCam people of the world they already have it.
Massivly paralell computing clusters would be one field where you could use it. Or for running all the computers as a single system image if someone felt like developing an OS that could handle it. Except I dont really think that many students would care.
Backup servers is the only place where I've found any use for it, but then they have to take multiple 100Mbit streams at a time. And while not Gigabit, Fibre Channel is useful for consolidated storage. But then I dont think many students would like to pay $20 per gigabyte per month in storage costs.
Personally, apart from infrastructure needs, I dont think there are many applications for Gigabit. The bandwidth is there for most things already. It's only when you start shifting the infrastructure from client/server/peer-to-peer to something completely different that there will be a use for it. And the bandwidth wont be the most serious problem in many cases anyway; latency is far worse.
This would make quite the interesting playground for Massively Mutli-Player First Person Shooters (MMPFPS?) - of course your computer would need serious processing power...
Wouldn't you want to play Unreal Ultimate: up to 1000 players in maps up to 5 square miles (scale)?!
Of course, making the maps would be a huge undertaking...
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
Administrators aren't sure what anybody needs that kind of bandwidth for yet, but they are curious to see how it gets used.
At a wildly conservative estimate of $75 per run, that's over $1 million being spent "to see what happens." I'm all in favor of the experimental nature of the University and I'm strongly in favor of trying to buy ahead of the curve where possible.
But...couldn't an experiment to see what everyone might do with 1 Gbps fiber be scaled to a quarter of that size or even a tenth of that size and the rest of the money spent on other equipment or infrastructure needs?
It might future-proof them, but AFAIK Gbit ethernet is running just fine on four pair Cat 5, which they probably already have installed. The annoying nature of fiber optics has IMHO kept it from being "the next step" in end-user distributive network technology -- it's fragile, complex to fix and the interfaces are more expensive and non-standard on most equipment that 16k people would use.
Given the budget crunches that most states are feeling, it seems strangely inappropriate to blow at least $1 million to see what happens (yes, CWRU gets money from Ohio).
Perhaps there will be a huge video-conferenced/digitally-recorded class initiative!
Stream or download your lectures in full MPEG2 broadcast quality with stereo sound. Also available on DVD for a modest production fee.
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
Case Western used to have an ATM network available to all of its students which was all super fast and had high bandwidth. However, they found that a pure network of ATM was too unstable (there were numerous random outages that got really annoying) and started switching back to ethernet.
However it looks like they are not going to settle with 100mbps and just go straight to Gigabit.
I guess they like to have their network be as fast as possible.
If Ihad a GB network connection and was at collage I'd make sure I could get the leatures pumped through to my bed room.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Nerd: I developed a program to download porn one million times faster.
Marge: Does anyone really need that much porn?
Homer: (salivating noise) Ahhhhhhhh million times faster.
Like 50 OC3's?
A SSN by itself is not that big of a deal since to do anything worthwhile with an SSN requires knowing who its assigned to. If you can make that connection, then concievably you could use it to track someone's movements around campus, but even that's limited since only the dorms and a couple buildings require card access (at least when I was there).
One risk I can see is if the school still uses a points system keyed off of your card. When I went there, you could buy points for your ID which could be used to buy stuff at the campus stores and some of the cafeterias. I imagine someone could potentially pirate your SSN for that purpose, although we're still talking only a couple hundred dollars at max.
-Mike (CWRU class of '97)
Can you say "solution in search of a problem"?
One of those "our school is better than yours" type of things, I guess.
room101 -- how much can you stand before they break you?
(they always break you eventually)
My wife is getting her Ph.D. at CWRU, so I've had a chance to check out their infrastructure. CWRU jumped on the ATM bandwaggon in the early 90s, back when ATM was the holy grail of networking (was there any Byte edition that didn't have an article on ATM?), so they deployed ATM-over-fiber to every office and every dorm room on campus. Talk about misreading the future. Now I guess since they've got all that fiber in place already, they're probably thinking they might as well capitalize on it and move to gigabit. I can only assume that they're making use of the same fiber, otherwise they'd be out a whole lotta money. This is more of a case of a lucky second chance than exceptional foresight.
I'm also not particularly impressed with their IT department. They like touting their computing horn, but my wife wasn't able to obtain one of their elusive ethernet-over-ATM adapters for two summer sessions now, being forced instead to connect via their notoriously flakey PPP dial-in at glacial modem speeds--while on campus. So much for their leadership in advanced campus networking. Oh, but they do have 802.11b in their main library, so I guess they get one point for that.
Probably more than 1on1
i'm not saying that to be a pro-linux preacher, but one thing they could certainly accomplish with this system is a) more easily downloading ISOs to install from and b) mirroring bottlenecked servers' projects. Of course realistically it'll be used mostly for gaming, pr0n, and war3z...
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
...or is it to battle the insane bandwidth sucked up by thousands of students downloading full DVD quality porn?
How it will be used. Get real use your brain and think what it was like being 19 and away from home and without a girlfriend cuz your a geek.
Apple's netboot allows Macs to boot from a server. You can have one specially configured copy of MscOS on a machine running Mac OS X Server and then have a whole lab of Macs boot from it. They don't enen need to have hard drives. This is, of course, extremely bandwith intensive and that's why Apple has been pushing gigabit ethernet.
How does the real-life performance of gigabit compare to disk i/o? Does this mean that file access via a network file server would actually perform better than a local drive?
"You lucky, lucky bastards!"
Probably someone will start coding those interactive video pron games
I leave it as an exercise for your imaginations as to the best way to implement this.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
You do realize that 1000Mbps is actually faster than most IDE hard drives? (I don't know what kind of drives they have..) The fastest ATA-100 drive I have gets about 35MB/sec at peak.. That's 65MB/sec you can't even really use for file transfers.
Anything above 100baseT isn't really all that useful for induvidual workstations and servers, but it increases throughput for MANY workstations and servers, all sending traffic on the net at the same time.
Also, remember that your PCI bus can only talk at a maximum 133MB/sec (and if you have many peripherals, some of that is already being used), so anything faster than 1 gigabit, and your computer can't even talk that fast.
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" =)
Immersive Video Conferencing? (cough)pr0n(cough)
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
This is not unusual. The problem is particularly noticable with the upgrade from 100base to 1000base. A little time tuning the network infrastructure (using non standard MTU, etc) can see huge gains in performace.
Most modern PC's won't have any problem handling the bandwith of 1000base. There is plenty of PCI bandwith and memory bandwith for DMA. A tuned IP stack on a reasonable CPU won't have a problem either. Finding an application that can handle it is going to be a little harder.
I always wished I could get video "reruns" of classes. Where I went they did videoconference classes for remote sites and they kept a tape, but there was only one tape made of each class, you had to go the library to get it, and half the time it was either checked out or permanently lost when you got there.
I think Fast Ethernet and some switches would be enough, unless they are planning to use app servers or something like that. Probably they won't have a gigabit link connecting with Internet for each student...
I would like to know how expensive it will be when they start to have problems with those fibers =)
I would have loved fibre in my dorm room back in college, as kicking back X applications to one's PC wouldn't have been a chore. It was ok with 10Mbit, but the latency drop and bandwidth boost with fibre would have made it seem like I was really in the engineering labs.
I was a student at Case from 93-97 and lived in the dorms. At that time they had both Single-mode and Multi-mode fiber running to every room (2 drops of each for doubles). I think it was '96 when we switched to ATM over multi-mode fiber.
To get that increase in bandwidth they must have updated the switches and run everyone on the more expensive (unused) single mode cables.
I am sure it is not new fiber. It's the stuff that has been installed for a decade.
Yes... if/when there is a legit application for gigabit P2P, it will probably emerge in arenas like this, before making its way to the wide world. :)
Gigabit P2P would be a great way to exhaust the excessive capacity of the post-WorldCom era.
My personal bet: P2P Reality TV. Maybe I should go and patent this...
My blog
Actually, all of the fiber cards to be used are still multimode. There isn't a need (yet) to use the singlemode fibers. Besides, the multimode equipment is far cheaper!
Of course, most of their machines will most likely be configured such that they can't use that full bandwidth over anything but a subnet anyhow, so this is kinda ridiculous...
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 fiber started in 1989, before there was Category 5 UTP(or Cat 3, for that matter). The choice was fiber or thinwire. You decide :-)
So now we're moving from the same switches that were put in in 1989(hubs, really) and the somewhat newer ATM stuff to all new gigabit goodness...
Wow... looks as though each student can have 1.67Gb/s if they divide up the bandwidth equally.
And their connection is 1,000 times faster than my broadband? I thought my broadband was capable of 10Mb/s(?)
Several uni's are upgrading their computer networks from 100 megabit to 1 gigabit. My university (IU) will be beginning the process soon, with a completion date in late 2003 or early 2004. That's 100,000 users, approximately. Granted, a good portion of those probably aren't on campus to enjoy that bandwidth, but I know *I* am :)
:)
I've heard of several other universities doing this as well. It just makes sense when it's time to replace wiring (or in our case, get two new Technology buildings that will hold all of our servers) to upgrade to the next level.
I guess this is our "gee-whiz, college kids are lucky" post of the week. Just remember what we have to *pay* for this stuff
I remember the good ol' days as a student. 155Mbit ATM to my desktop back in 1996! How many of you were playing with you 8-bit ISA Ethernet cards or Token Ring then?
The one thing going for CWRU is they love to throw money at anything they can. Just take a tour of campus and ask how much all of the "artistic" sculptures cost?
- 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.For a brief (past 3 years or so) history of Case Reserve's IT career, check out the Yahoo Internet Life Most Wired polls. The year before I came to CWRU, we were the "most wired" campus in America, due to our 155 MBPS ATM network. Since then, we've failed to make the polls entirely. Apparently, some of the numbers were faked by our VP of IT, though I honestly can't figure out which ones (I'm not being sarcastic, I don't know).
The old ATM network was great and fast when it worked, but it could get flaky at times. And there were the hours where it conked out entirely...I'm also told there was some lag. I am confident that by the time I get back to CWRU from my co-op, next spring, they'll have all the bugs worked out and gigabit Ethernet will be working well. Additionally, there will supposedly also be a campus wireless network, though details on that are more difficult to come by. I know they've already done the library and the dorms, I believe, and I think the entire campus will be wireless by the fall. But I haven't heard much since I left school for the summer.
"I may be quite wrong." - Socrates
But you get blazing speed.. just dont get to DO anything with it..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
A hardrive can do ~35 megabytes a second. That is equal to 280 megabits per second...well over the 100mbps limit.
Remember, 8 bits to a byte, and network speeds are measured in bits per second and hard drive rates and files are measured in bytes per second (or just bytes).
Slashdot ate my freaking post. Thanks, 404 error. (Maybe it was the router, the firewall, or one of the many switches. Oh well.)
:)
I wanted to say thanks to all of you who responded and confirmed my suspicions. I find it humorous (sad?) that all of the "Use it for pr0n!" and P2P karma-whores are sucking all of the modpoints, while those of us who are directly disproving the story submission's assertion that "Case Western is installing fiber connections in 16,000 computers..." are going unmodded.
Not that *I* need the points, but maybe you CRWUbies could use them, eh?
Hi, Froggy.
-RT
SlashSigTheorem: Humorous, Political, Critical, Constructive- If you have a
Yes, but he said 1,000mbps, not 100. In light of that, it would stand to reason that his original post was correct.
Life is too short to proofread.
CWRU has a history of installing advanced networks for no particular reason, to sit mostly unused for years, until they install the next advanced network. They already pulled all that fiber a while ago, back when ATM was going to rule the universe.
Nice fantasy you've got going there.
As anybody should be able to guess, network bandwidth has absolutely nothing to do with how fast an individual SETI@Home work unit can be processed.
Now, if they were to start investing heavily in quad processor systems with gigs of ram you would have an argument.
My office has been taken over by iPod people.
Some one must have asked John what it requires for multiplayer.
You must mean Sacstroker Audiotorium. :)
And come to think of it, I never did get around to sneaking out into the quad at 2:00am with a ladder, and finally doing a swap('sac', 'stro').
Jandar0's other article mentioned that there's an adapter for 100Mbps service for people who can't use gig-e fiber cards (Mac users, etc.), which is probably good enough for laptops (otherwise, if you've got a roommate with a desk-top, use their PC as a bridge or something...) That shouldn't be too bad for performance - you'll be limited to 100Mbps, but the performance should be better since the backbone has more bandwidth for everybody, so you should still get decent file-server performance, and Gnutella won't be bandwidth-limited...
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
it is worth noting that the school is changing its aim to appeal to more "average" students, some professors in the comp sci department don't know how to use ping (true story), and the food service is getting to the point of lethal. oh and the stress is really sucky.
There'd be less latency between transmitting completed work units and getting new ones with a fast network. Unless the transfers happen while calculations are begin performed, of course, which would take a little bit of processor time away to handle the network communications, in which case less time spent transferring data would probably still be a minute benefit. :)
So "absolutely nothing to do with" is just barely an overstatement.
some of us put the ATM technology available to us to good use a few years ago. see the results here. The CWRU Beowulf Project was mankind's last best hope for Bromberg's numerical Integration Approximation Theorem...
It's not so much the fiber that's a big deal as it is the "gigabit ethernet" part. CWRU had fiberoptic for awhile as well, but it was running 155 MBPS ATM switches (and ATM never took off as it was supposed to). What are the backbone switches at George Washington?
"I may be quite wrong." - Socrates
I don't know if anybody's done 2-dimensional lossless coding, or how well it works, but it shouldn't be hard - do line-by-line differences and then compress those, if you want something crude.
You can also find lossless music coders - "Shorten" used by etree.org gets compression ratios of 2-3, which is a lot bigger than MP3s but keeps the audiophiles happy.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
You're exactly right, but the point is that with the increased bandwidth, you can be downloading more streams of 6 k/s songs on kazaa. So you won't get a single song faster but you can still utilize that bandwidth. There will always be a way to utilize the excess bandwidth, trust me. Of course, before too much longer we're going to start hitting the PCI bandwidth threshold, but we haven't hit it yet, not even with gigabit ethernet.
"I may be quite wrong." - Socrates
Maybe most users can't use a full gbps of data. Most of them *can* use more than 100mbps, so even if they only double their bandwidth, it's still nice, and there's plenty of room for growth. Obviously things like file servers can benefit from the faster connections more directly, since they're often transmitting to many recipients at once, so they'll probably get beefed up early.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I went to CWRU when the initially installed the fiber on campus. All on campus housing, and academic building had fiber installed in 1988. The off campus frat houses (there are two types of frat houses at CWRU southside on campus and northside off campus) got fiber a few years later.
The Economics of Website Security
You know technically CWRU combined their EE and CS departments so as not to lose said accreditation...
"I may be quite wrong." - Socrates
I thought most computers couldn't even support gigabit ethernet. Personally, I'd rather have wireless everywhere at my school. It probably wouldn't cost $27 million either.
Do your homework. We have an OC-3 type pipe to the outside internet, though I don't even think the intended value of GigE was for outside internet sites--the purpose is for oncampus connections and connections to other Internet 2 universities. Just read above a little bit for further explanation, as it's already been said.
"I may be quite wrong." - Socrates
If CWRU is installing the wireless, they'll have at least some semblence of security on it. If universities are hunting down rogue wireless, for reasons other than just clueless control-freakness, it's because they're (legitimately) concerned about uncontrolled access as a security risk. Of course, security problems are much different for academia than for businesses - here in the business world, the classic security threat is some college kid hacking into your network. But if you're *running* a university network, all those threats are already *inside* your firewall - and they're your customers....
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
What's the point you ask?
Simple, once these "kids" graduate or leave for other reasons, they will be drunk on the cup of "Free Unlimited" Bandwidth and will have expectation that providers e.g. (ISP's, Cable Companies) provide them with the same level of performance, they had back at college at a "cheap price".
Recently, I took a training class with some of the University of Michigan Network Admins and they were talking about filtering and quoting bandwidth because in the explosion of usage. I explained to them that the solution was to give the students all they could use, so when they leave UofM and head out to the real world, they EXPECT and DEMAND BANDWIDTH. The pathetic amount of bandwidth meagerly doled out by the phone companies is pathetic. The current rate for a T1 is $800 for a measly 1.5MegaBIT, ( yes BIT as opposed to BYTE ). We need higher expectations which will push low cost bandwidth solutions!
Setting expectations is what life is all about and college is a great place to teach it.
Cheap, Unlimited, Bandwidth to the masses NOW!
Typically, 64kbps raw voice gets compressed to 16kbps or 8kbps, then wrapped in several layers of RTP and IP overhead that bring it back up to around 12-24kbps. Won't make a dent in your shared 10Mbps Ether, much less Gig-E-to-the desktop. The problem is that it's latency-sensitive, and getting stuck behind big ftp transfers can be a problem - and it's unlikely that a high-powered switching network will be able to prioritize it. On the other hand, utilization will probably be low enough that there won't be much jitter - the real problem becomes connecting the PBX to the outside world.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
He is a warez Monger. He will become a god because of his Hard drives...
[Old Man Voice] Ya know, when I was a kid, we had more stringent theological requirements for godhood....
Omnipotence, omniscience, at least turning yourself into a swan to get laid.
Ragnarok, Armegeddon, at least killing the Titans.
Our gods destroyed whole cities of pervs, flooded the Earth, poked out their eyes in exchange for Wisdom, at least got themselves nailed to trees....
I dunno about you kids...[/Old Man Voice]
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
Not all of us were "rejects". I suspect that a lot of CWRU students got accepted to other schools but couldn't pay their high tuition. CWRU's scholarships are very competitive. However if they keep ramping up tuition at these rates, they're going to become just as expensive as peer institutions in the University Athletic Association, and that is when students are going to start expecting more.
"I may be quite wrong." - Socrates
and believe me, one word: PORN. If you went there, you'd understand.
more bandwidth for porn warez and mp3s
http://www.disassociate.com
They've already had some of this--I remember when a prank utilizing the moving chalkboards was to be pulled in the chemistry building...it never worked. I think what they have to be more worried about is the chairs in Rockefeller 301 and their probability of being turned backwards on a given morning...
"I may be quite wrong." - Socrates
When Yahoo! Most Wired announced that CWRU was #1, the University was thrilled by it. Of course, people had to wonder how we got #1. Some of the answers placed by our former IT VP were indeed questionable, and the result lead to CWRU disappearing from the Most Wired poll the following year. It was not a surprise that shortly after Neff resigned. Some of us believed that if he didn't resign, Auston would have fired him.
1 Gbps is comparable in speed to the internal system buses -- it's 125 MegaBYTES per second!
In effect, you can now think of all the computing resources on the LAN (CPU, disks, memory, etc.) as being interconnected with a fast system bus comparable in speed to PCI. 10 PCs connected with GigE don't look much different than a multiprocessor with 10 CPUs, do they? And that's with off-the-shelf PCs that were built with today's assumptions that network bandwidth is limited. As bandwidth becomes more plentiful, those assumptions will change, and PCs will add hardware and software support for all sorts of cool stuff...
There are still a lot of unsolved problems in this area, of course, which is why it's so cool to throw these problems at a university full of smart students.
Some that I can think of from the top of my mind are:
o storage connectivity: in a traditional PC, your hard drive tends to be local, because you need
several megaBYTEs/second read/write bandwidth. Well, with GigE, you now have enough bandwidth to write to a disk connected to the network. This stuff is still in its infancy.
Do a Google search for "iSCSI" -- SCSI over IP.
o multiprocessors: Someone mentioned Beowulf clusters, which I can see as a first step to getting some parallel computing going. But there are still bottlenecks, like the software overhead of transferring the data around, computing TCP checksums, etc. etc. Think how cool it would be if you could just access a remote machine's memory like you can local memory. You need special hardware support to take away some of the overhead. This stuff is also still in its infancy.
Do a Google search on "RDMA" (Remote DMA).
o Someone asked "why GigE to the edge?"
One reason why networking companies are pushing GigE all the way to the end hosts is so that the network elements (switches, routers, etc.) don't have to buffer bursts of traffic when you're doing speed conversion from a 1GigE uplink to a 10/100 Mbps end host. If a burst of packets arrives at the edge switch from the GigE uplink, they'll have to be buffered for some time while they "trickle" to the endstation. If the link to the end station is also 1 Gbps, then the packets can be transmitted as quickly as they arrive (assuming that the link is not oversubscribed).
Why do you want to avoid buffering in the network?
Buffers in switches and routers are MEGA-expensive, because they have to be REALLY fast. We're talking memory bandwidths of 8 Gigabytes/second on a non-blocking 32 Gigabit/second switch fabric. That stuff is really hard to build, and even harder to build cheap enough that anyone can afford it.
Buffering introduces delay (latency).
o Also, keep in mind that modern switches can apply QoS mechanisms like policing to limit the amount of bandwidth that a given host can consume, so the fact that your "pipe" can "do" 1Gbps doesn't mean that you'll be able to get that much traffic into/out of the network. Depending on the switch, administrators can configure how much bandwidth you get pretty finely.
It's the P2PreCrimes unit of the RIAA.
They're using a small cadre of hip teens suspended in fluid to determine the likelihood of a particular piece of music being stolen.
Hot Damn! It's the Soggy Bottom Boys!
Maybe high resolution webcams...
Hmm, yes... hi-res coed-dorm webcam!
What time is it/will be over there? Check with my iPhone app!
I think that it's time to pool all of your hard disks into a RAID enclosure and set up your boxes to boot over the network. (of course you'll probably have to dump Windows to do that -- but I wouldn't really mind... :-)
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
What will I do with my gigabit ethernet card when school is out?
TodayTM BillyJoelTM GoogleTMd for StitchTMes due to WindowsTM while RollerbladeTMing with an AppleTM and a PopsicleTM
My prediction: Marketing 1, Implementation 0.
This is, after all, the school that upgraded their entire campus to ATM (back when ATM was first available), arranged for an nice fast connection to the outside world (100MB, which was a big pipe at the time), and the stuck a firewall with two 10MB ethernet cards between the two. This went on for a good year...
-JS (former CWRU graduate student)
Vanity of vanities, all is vanity...
I am very envious of the students there. I went to USC -- no, not Southern Cali... the other one.
We had such a horrifying network, it was really sad. Since I worked in a group in the CS Dept, all my friends and roommates would yell at me whenever the network went down. And did it go down... Ugh. Literally 2-5 times a week.
Unfortunately, it was not just the School Internet connection that went down, either. We lost connectivity even on our own network many times.
Since I was working on an Astronomy project at the time, I was working with data files that were over 500 MB a piece. I was not allowed to use the network to transmit. Get that... It would be "Wasting too much" bandwidth to use it that way, heh. So I would have killed for Gigabit connectivity.
On an unrelated side-note, I remember when the CS dept blocked Napster... and didn't tell anyone. Man, the papers went nuts when students complained. Then we had to backtrack and say it was a mistake of when the new proxies were installed. Heh.
"PC Load Letter? What the $@#% does that mean?!"
Gigabit on the desktop is probably helping workstation and network admins more than anyone. When you think about it, 100Mb/s is a huge bottleneck for today's hard drives. We live in the day of commonplace ATA100/133 hard drive transfer rates. 12.5MB/s (equivalent to 100Mb/s) just doesn't cut it when it comes to doing major OS and application service packs, or unattended OS installs (take the 1 gigabyte Windows XP install, for example). Even with gigabit ethernet (equiv. to 125MB/s), there is still a bottleneck with today's fastest ATA133 IDE drives and Ultra160/320 SCSI drives. Thank goodness the 10-gigabit standard was recently approved.
Funny, but you're closer to the truth than you might realize. Not for actual lectures though. CWRU uses the "blackboard" system to hold after-hour chats that are like recitations; one of my classes last fall had one. It was very helpful, and though I can't say videoconfrencing would have helped it a great deal, I suppose seeing my professor talk in response to our typed questions might have been useful. He certainly could have responded faster had this been the case. I'm sure you'll see lots more uses come this fall.
"I may be quite wrong." - Socrates
Oh God, someone else remembers that great day...wonder if you've seen the video commemorating the prank...it should still be around on CWRUnet. The look on his face was PRICELESS. I still remember him laughing.
"I may be quite wrong." - Socrates
What exactly did he lie about, is my question. Before looking at Yahoo's take on it, I looked at our statistics for the year we were #1--nothing really surprised me except perhaps the support availability, which to me is not so massive an issue that it causes a university to go from #1 in the nation to off the polls...
"I may be quite wrong." - Socrates
What, they have computers in Rolla? They don't even have a real bar there. It's either Applebees or drive out to that shitty-ass redneck bar "Z's place" by Doolittle. What a fucking joke of a village...
:)
:) ) there was a fair, and fireworks, and I won a Mustang! :)
Go get ticks at Merrimac Springs, or what? Go see the roadside psychic along I44? Muahahaha.
At least when I was there a couple weeks ago (Visiting a cute DJ chick from KDAA
(No, didn't win the damn mustang, some fucker from California won it...)
Gotta get the DJ chick to move in with me in Omaha, Rolla is a hella-boring shithole.
games games games games games games games games....just killing time while the bozo server decides I've waited 20 seconds before replying. No wonder Gnulix never took off.
Hic iacet Arthurus, rex quondam rexque futurus.
Checkout Today's Business section of the SAN JOSE MERCURY NEWS (7/22/02) Which Certainly does NOT use the Headline (Paraphrased) "... We're not quite sure what we'll do with it..." :-\
;~p
Try the comments relating to Research Science folks. Read re. Steve Corbato of the National Consortium, INTERNET2's comments. www.internet2.edu
OBVIOUS FOLKS - Do you REALLY think anyone would spend $27 Mil just to see what one could do with it? Get real...
see subject
in this age of communication i'm just not getting through
I just bought a Cisco Catalyst 2822-EN on eBay for $125 and when it arrived, it had a FDDI Fiber DAS module in it with 2 Fiber ports and a DIN passthrough port on it. I can't imagine that the module could cost that much money if i got that and a switch for $125
In practice, gig ether (even over fiber) achieves only 400 to 600 megabits/sec. SCL tested some of the first gigE cards and got terrible performance. Their cluster cookbook is rather dated, but compares some of the popular interconnects (Myrinet, Fast Ethernet, and FDDI).
Few cards that I have seen support jumbo frames; even then, I've only seen cards that go up to 9000-octet frames. Face it: Ethernet doesn't scale well past 100mbits/sec.
As a student who lived in a dorm last year, I saw lots of file sharing going on (p2p, that is).
The thing that got shared more than any other(surpassing even porn) is movies. Regular action, drama, comedy.
I'm guessing this is because women enjoy mainstream movies, whereas the majority of women aren't interested in porn.
Here's the Observer article back in 1999:
On April 20, 1999, Undergraduate Student Government (USG) passed a bill calling for an investigation into the results of the Yahoo! Internet Life survey that ranked CWRU as the "most wired" university in the country. The bill urged the university to "investigate the truthfulness of the responses to the survey that resulted in CWRU's number one ranking" as a result of an April 16, 1999 issue of The Observer that "pointed out questionable statistics about CWRU's computing facilities and services that were reported in the survey," the bill read.
You might say that Neff bended the facts of the Wired survey. Listing that 90% of public computers available 24 hours a day does not note the fact that we only have a limited number of machines available in Smith Lab, PDELC, and the Weatherhead Lab. Also, students being guranteed 25 MB of web space (this was before home.cwru.edu) off the server was not totally true. Student groups were able to request web space but not individual students. Several other entries were also called questionable just because student groups and staff didn't believe it was true.
When the 2001 survey came out, CWRU was not even listed. Whether CWRU chose not to submit an entry to Yahoo! or Yahoo! itself felt that the questionable answers given in last year's poll warrant its removal is up to those conspiracy theorists.
And i thought Morgan State university was going to have problems with inappropriate usage of network resources that increased operating costs!
:P) and can forsee a raesonable number of people cooperating to DOS the core or strategic servers (just because they can). Am I alone in this foresight?
[we are moving to pure-fabric 6513 cores, pure-fabric 6509 distribution in the academic buildings, 6509 distribution in the dorms, (all of the above native IOS) and 4006/3500xl access layer... gige from access to dist, gige back to dual cores from every academic building, a couple of pixen 535 to handle firewalling, etc.]
After migrating most of the academic/administrative buildings, the cores have et to offer any indication of traffic on the load graphs...
why does anyone need gig to the desk everywhere? and what are they aggregating it back to the distribution/core with ? (i smell MASSIVE oversubscription) (like i can talk about that
The network wasn't what lured me in as a student. It was the fact that it was one of 5 universities in the entire US that fit what I was looking for in a school. I was waitlisted at one, got small scholarships from three others, and got a significant scholarship from CWRU. That's what brought me in. And I'm glad to be a student at CWRU rather than the other school I thought I wanted to go to when I was a senior in high school. Granted, I've had my problems. The registrar's office randomly decided to change the spelling of my name at one point last year. I had a hard time getting it changed back because I don't have ready access to a birth certificate. But I believe the environment is what you make it. I believed the same type of thing you do...until I got to know some people. I know that kind of thing happens from time to time, but if you're a disagreeable student, they aren't going to want to help you much. Getting things in writing, from what I've found, is a good thing to do no matter what company/business you're working with, and I don't see any reason for a University to be an exception anyway.