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."

Comments

Re:Argh! 8Gb

[addaon]

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.

Overhead

[yerricde]

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.

Re:Bottleneck

[Emil S Hansen]

Assumin its actually 8.6 bytes/sec and not bits like another poster suggested, the pci bus would become oversaturated since it can only transfer 3.2 gb/sec ( correct me if the transfer rate is wrong).

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.

Re:CalTech

[ccnull]

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.