Nationwide Fiber Optic Science Network

zCyl writes "An article at SMH describes a large fiber optic network called the National LambdaRail, which has completed 1,084 out of a planned 16,000 kilometers between major universities and research institutions. Upon completion it should transmit 400 Gbps and stretch across the continental U.S. Access to the network will be intentionally restricted to scientists and researchers only 'for research and experimentation in networking technologies and applications'."

Comments

I wonder

[IANAL(BIAILS)]

Any plans to string a few lines up to Canada and connect our institutions up here?

How would you use that?

[paul248]

What kind of equipment can actually handle data at those speeds? 50GB/sec is several times faster than even the fastest DDR ram... Is the networking equipment able to run so much faster because it's specialized to do one task?

Re:How would you use that?

[meta-monkey]

Somebody moderated this Interesting? Jesus.

You're not going to get 50GB/sec from one node to another. it's from one network to another. PCI-X 533 (the next gen PCI-X) can only do 4.3GB/s. However, if you want to connect a cluster of, say, a dozen nodes with PCI-X 533 to another dozen nodes with PCI-X 533 across the country...

Re:How would you use that?

[div_2n]

One Cisco 12000 router can easliy move 320Gbps of data. As another poster noted, this kind of capacity is meant to handle many nodes at full speed.

Re:Hasn't this been done already?

[xactoguy]

And hopefully as with the original network, eventually it will branch out and become part of our daily lives. Perhaps this is the beginning of fiber actually being a viable option for net access for citizens, seeing as the costs otherwise have so far been prohibative to deploying a network.