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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."
While this is pretty cool theoretically, current hard drives don't even come close to handling this kind of bandwidth, so there isn't much use for this until we can actually manage to store the data fast enough to keep up with the connection.
The problem is, what sort of mass storage device can write at 8.6 gigabits/sec?
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Geek: "I'm developing a program to download porn 1 million times faster."
Marge: "Does anyone need that much porn?"
Homer: "MMMmmm... one million times.... (gurgle noise)"
Okay, now to say something serious. Even with broadband, most files download painfully slow because no one can afford to constantly upgrade their servers to dish out large volume of data to the public. If you ask me, 8.6Gb ethernet would be a lot more useful. After all, huge file transfers on your ethernet are at least common place.
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Okay, todays RAM can top 8GB/s, so there is no problem generating data and sending it through this like that. However, hard drives can't even reach 1/100th of this speed, so don't expect your p2p programs to go much faster ;)
This can be great for sites that require a massive pipe and have fiber hard drives's or ISPs. Also be good defence against a slashdotting ;)
Who needs hard disk capacity if you can stream a movie in realtime? *eg*
BTW, even if hard disks eventually reach the required capacity, you wouldn't be able to store it on disk anyway thanks to MPAA's DRM initiative...
I imagine that there will be a day when you can get ANY movie regardless of popularity from Blockbuster, Best Buy or Circuit City easier than filling out a prescription. You just tell them what legacy movie or TV show episodes you want and 15 minutes later your burned DVD with professional looking label printed on it is ready for pick-up for $20-$30. It may even include a difficult to replicate vendor hologram on the label side of the DVD to help distingish it from non-approved burns.
The demonstrations used a 10 Gbps link...
So, stop making it sound like one can turn a 28.8 modem into a cable modem. Parallel downloading is nothing new (rate limited ftp servers have been around for years.)
Are you kidding? The ability to download a full DVD in 5 seconds has tons of practical application. For instance, you could rent movies over the net...
why are we assuming base 10?
Because we're humans speaking English. The assumption when humans speak english is that all numbers are base 10 positive whole numbers, unless otherwise noted.
You don't need to download a movie in 5 seconds to rent a move over the net. You only need to go slightly faster than real time. In theory you could make it in exactly real time but in practice it doesn't work that way. DVDs are variable bit rate with a maximum rate of 10 Mbps so 11 Mbps should make it.
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the internet is much bigger than 2 DVDs, more like tera or exabytes Add to that the warezpups on IRC, the web, all the file archives, all the mirrors of those file archives, all the datawarehouses, achives of datawarehouses, etc... and I think you're going way over exabytes (1000 PB I'm assuming?)
>Actually, it is precisely off by a factor of 8, as is always the difference between B versus b
Ah, but it isn't! More and more often, there is a direct 10x correlation. Serial ATA, Serial Attached SCSI, Fiber (Fibre) Channel all use 8b/10b encoding, so each 8 bit byte takes up 10 bits on the wire (or equivalent medium). Hence, on a 1Gbps link, the max transfer rate is 100MB/s.
Of course, if you have a trinary computer, the algorithms may have to be adjusted slightly...
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You will never see that much bandwidth because there are so many other bottlenecks. Your throughput is only as fast as the slowest node. To be honest I believe advancements in fiber technology like Dense Wave Division Multiplexing (DWDM) and advancements in router processor/RAM technology will have a greater effect on your throughput than this. Although it will be a while before your throughput from the net is faster than your HDD can handle you do make a valid point about the limits of the technology. In particular with LAN file servers and transfer rates. Gig Ethernet cards already come standard on Power Macs. I think the next evolution of PC design will be RAM drives and storage. You will also see larger HDD cache, and more use of cache in general.
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
And I won't add the problem of hard drive speeds which can't handle it. Of course, big RAID arrays and the like can, but not consumer drives.
Of course, eventually, when we use a better quality encoding method for video/audio, the datarate may have to increase, but right now, it's useless.
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You're assuming an x86 machine, which might not be the case
This won't help me a bit... I got a bandwidth cap. :(
Communication companies use bits because it lets them say bigger, more impressive sounding numbers, and because it's the 'fundamental' unit of information measuring
No one uses 10 bits/byte.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
After having read the article, I'd say that perhaps the biggest achievement wasn't the huge transfer rate, but the high efficiency. Apparently standard TCP coupled with antiquated congestion control methods waste two thirds of bandwidth, and current methods to get around that cause problems for other users. The new protocol had an efficiency of around 90 percent. I'm assuming here (but I could be entirely wrong, as the article does not explain it), that the rest of the bandwidth (two thirds in the first case, 10 percent in the second), just goes to waste. Perhaps it represents packet loss, meaning packets that are sent, and thus consume bandwidth, but that get corrupted or thrown away somewhere halfway. Any enlightenment here would be appreciated. Anyway, being able to send three times as much data over the same link as with the standard protocol sounds like a very nice achievement.
They are transmitting accross a public network, so in a sense many streams will be contended at one point or another. By splitting the data into 10 streams they are getting an advantage, as their data stream will in effect have a 10-fold priority over other internet traffic.
But what if this was done on a mass scale, and everyone used 10 streams to increase their transfer rate? I imagine the combined bandwidth would be as bad as a single stream was. Which I find questionable if its efficient, or a good thing for the Internet.