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Net Speed Record Smashed
BrianWCarver writes "The BBC is reporting that scientists have set a new internet speed record by transferring 6.7 gigabytes of data (the equivalent of 4 hours of DVD-quality movies) across 10,978 kilometres (6,800 miles), from Sunnyvale in the US to Amsterdam in Holland, in less than one minute. Average speed: more than 923 megabits per second, or more than 3,500 times faster than a typical home broadband connection. The data was sent across the Internet2 network. Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (Slac) Computer Services participated in the record-breaking event. Slac has an interest in such high-speed transfers as they have accumulated the largest known database in the world, which grows at one terabyte per day."
What the article doesn't mention (and it's a virtual clone of SLAC's press release) is this is part of the Internet2 Land Speed Record competition. SLAC (working with a few others) holds both the previous record and the new one.
For those wondering what the hell SLAC is, it stands for the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center.
Apparently, the SLAC library (SPIRES) stores pretty much every particle physics experiment data and write-up ever.
Here is the pretty picture and their about page.
For the purposes of the contest, they're not required to write to any media:
In computing the amount of data transferred, only data transferred from user-process-space buffer(s) in the data-source network application to user-process-space buffer(s) in the data-sink network application may be counted.
It's a lot of data, and it's a fast network. But it's manageable as local I/O.
In special effects work each frame is handled as an uncompressed TIFF at high res (I can't remember the exact bit depth and res). Previewing sequences means streaming these TIFF images. Adds up to about 400MB/s sustained (that's byte, not bit). HD video at 720p has similar requirements -- don't forget, you musn't drop any frames, and it has to arrive on time.
I work in such an effects shop, and we've had several demos of HD-capable digital disk recorders over the last few months. Two out of three were based on Linux, and worked well (the other was custom). Twin Ultra 320 channels with software RAID across the two channels, XFS as a filesystem. They each did the job with a 2U enclosure full of largely stock components (except the video I/O board) -- and that's 3.2GBit/s I/O to the drive array.
actually there are over 200 universities and labs that use internet2. so if you don't count those several million people, then you are right.
Imagine, international internet gaming with low latencies all 'round. Sounds like a pipe dream.
Unfortunately, it is. The two farthest points around earth are 12,000 miles. Round trip means 24,000 miles. Speed of light is 186,000 miles / second. That means that, best theoretical case, round trip is 129 milliseconds. Of course, you'll never get close to the best theoretical case, particularly with wire, never mind routers, etc.
In the immortal words of John Carmack, "The Speed of Light Sucks".
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Article here: http://chronicle.com/free/v45/i47/47a02101.htm.
He missed a . that would be .648 Gbps
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
or if you do it the right way (tm):
10.978.000 / 300.000.000 =
10.978 / 300.000 ~= 0,036593 -> 36.59ms
(and you should probably get a better measure for both the distance and the speed of light
mats
One man's ceiling is another man's floor.
You have to write that 7000 Gb to 1000 tapes first. That will take MUCH longer than 24 hours, since you are limited to the speed of your SCSI bus and the speed and capacity of your tape robot.
Edith Keeler Must Die
You can do that but the results are measured in terabit-meters/second.
In case of the Single Stream Class IPv6 record that we still hold 675 Mb was transfered from Ljubljana over Vienna to New York and back over London, Paris, Geneve, Milan to Madrid making a total of 14.800 km of network with the average speed of 348 megabits/s and Data Transfer Speed of 5154 terabit-meters/second.
To cut the long story short: the speed is not the only thing important in such projects.
I will also use this opportunity to say: way to go ARNES and keep up the good work.
You transferred 600Mb (Megabits) which is equal to 75MB (MegaBytes) in about a minute. Wow, really impressive.
Yes, there is a difference between Mb and MB. I am assuming you meant MB, but you shouldn't rely on people to assume what you meant when you flub the units. You would no doubt call me on it if I said my penis was 6 ft long.
Add in that the speed of light is measured through a vacuum. Put in through something like fiber and the maximum speed is cut to 2/3 max.
.667) =
10,978 km / (300,000 km/sec *
10,978 kn / (200,100 km/sec) = 54.86 ms.
// Agent Green (Ian / IU7 / KB1JQO)
// IEEE 802.3: All 10base Are Belong To Us
Internet2 is what the Internet was originally designed to be: a network for purely for research. It is only available to the member groups, mostly universities and major research corporations. Here's the page to the consortium: Internet2
_______________________________
"I'm not Conceited...I'm just a realist..."