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8.6 GB Internet?
prostoalex writes "Caltech computer scientists announced the protocol, capable of delivering 8,609 Mbps over the Internet, using 10 simultaneous flows of data. The research project was conducted in partnership with CERN, DataTAG, StarLight, Cisco, and Level 3. The practical applications, according to the press release, is ability 'to download a full-length DVD movie in less than five seconds'. There is a number of papers and scientific publications available."
Yes, as the original poster said, it's 8.6 giga-BITS per second. Little 'b' means bits, big 'B' means bytes.
Saying 8.6GB is off by an order of magnitude.
Sigh..
On the internet, a byte is normally 10 bits--8 bits of data, one starting bit, and one ending bit. Thus, 10Mbps = 1 MBps.
Not only can a high-end storage array handle that sort of throughput, but it can do it without any bugs.
Will I retire or break 10K?
More nitpicking, yay! (a) If we assume base 10, it's actually ~0.9031 (log[10](8)) orders of magnitude off, as this is a logarithmic measure; (b) why are we assuming base 10? Base 2, which makes a lot more sense for this thing, gives us an even three orders of magnitude off; as a comment below mentioned, octal gives exactly one.
I've had this sig for three days.
It is just over a gig a second.
Not all of that is data. Some is packet headers. Some is error correction. That's why you can't push 6 KB per second over a v.90 dial-up connection at 48 kbps.
Will I retire or break 10K?
(4.7G on a SSSD (single sided, single density - not that anybody remembers those)
Actually when talking about DVDs, the density of each layer cannot change.
I believe you are referring to SSSL (Single-Sided, Single-Layer) DVDs, as each since on a regular red-ray DVD disc can have two layers of data.
I'm not sure if that's the same for the famed blu-ray discs or not, I would appreciate it if someone could enlighten me.
A 33 MHz/32 bit PCI bus which is standard in most PCs will transfer 133 MB/sec.
A 66 MHz/32 bit PCI bus which is in quite a few Intel and UNIX servers will transfer 266 MB/sec.
A 66 MHz/64 bit PCI bus which also is quite common in UNIX servers (and becomming in Intel) will transfer 532 MB/sec.
A 133 MHz/64 bit PCI bus which is the current standard for big UNIX servers will transfer, you guessed it, 1 GB/sec.
Mind you that these numbers are pr. PCI bus, some of the lager Intel servers, and most UNIX servers have more than one PCI bus.
Will work for bandwidth!
Look it up: Dictionary.com definition of order of magnitude
Marge: "Does anyone need that much porno?"
Depending on your communications medium, it's probably 10 bits per byte, not 8. And it's just easier for us humans to pretend it's 10 regardless.
Base 2 is pointless because comms people use SI prefixes properly*. 1 megabit = 1,000,000 bits. Base 10.
*Probably because not all platforms use 8 bit bytes (encoded to 10 bit bytes for transmission). The comms mfr's only care about the rate on the line.
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10Gbps Ethernet already exists.
The problem is that the fastest hard drives on the market today are Ultra320 SCSI, which have a throughput of 320MB per sec... or about 2.5Gbps. Even that's theoretical, of course. And few people have an all Ultra320 datacenter.
Just pointing out that the cabling is hardly the bottleneck when you reach that kind of speed, even at the LAN level. I've seen so many people upgrade their switches to gigabit ethernet then scratch their heads wondering why the network is still slow... when the server in the closet hasn't been upgraded in 5 years. Storage will continue to be the bottleneck on the LAN for a long time to come.
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Just a note that the bottleneck of drives isn't a problem at this point since for now 10Gb ethernet isn't targeted at the desktop or server. It is for links between switches. If you have a switch loaded full of Gb connections, you'll probably want something mroe than just a Gb connecting it to its neighbours. However going to ATM or POS really isn't great since you then have to route instead of just switch. Enter 10Gb ethernet to solve the problem.
This is useless to the Pentagon. Their problem is a shortage of raw bandwidth, not lack of a transport which can efficiently use what is available.
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A byte is not defined to be 8 bits. A byte is the smallest addressable unit of storage, which on most modern architectures is 8 bits.
Some older architectures used 7-bit bytes; some had 9-bit bytes.