China, Russia, U.S. To Build 100MBps Network

prostoalex writes "Gloriad (Global Ring Network for Advanced Applications Development), a scientific data network, will unite academic institutions in China, Russia and the United States with a 100 MBps link. National Center for Supercomputing Applications received a $2.8 mln grant from NSF, and both Russia and China will match this amount to contribute to network build-up. Later this year, as the Associated Press article notes, a new plan will be launched to move the international network to 10 GBps capacity."

Comments

Re:Bit 'B' or little 'b'?

[Kenja]

Well using the big 'B' is clear if its realy what you mean. Too often I see the two mixed up.

Politically odd? (sorry, OT)

[fiendo]

So let's see, we've got a 100MBps fat pipe direct from the heartland of the U.S. to the largest communist nation in the world, but I still can't get a direct flight from Miami to a communist country 90 miles off our shore???

Re:100 MBPS...

[jerde]

Wow, stunning...not. Even after the upgrade, it will be outdated before it ever finds a use.

Wow, stunning. You don't know what you're talking about.

The "B" is capitalized here for a reason. It's Bytes, not bits.

And if you were to RTFA, you'd find:

The network, expected to go online next month, will ring the Northern Hemisphere, connecting computers in Chicago with machines in Amsterdam, Moscow, Siberia, Beijing and Hong Kong before hooking up with Chicago again, said Greg Cole of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, one of the leaders of the Little GLORIAD project. Data will flow at 155 million bytes per second.

(emphasis mine)

A wide-area-network at well over 1Gbps (that's bits) is nothing to sneeze at.

From the same article:

Little GLORIAD is a "first big step" toward development of the higher-speed GLORIAD, Cole said. That effort, expected to be launched later this year, will move data at 10 gigabytes per second, 60 times faster than the Little GLORIAD.

Once you start talking about DVD-per-second rates of data, you've got something.

- Peter

Private worldwide networks.

[rice_burners_suck]

Perhaps one of the reasons academic institutions need their own "Internet-2" (so to speak) is to avoid spam and other traffic that goes through the big bad "Internet-1". A private network for academics takes them back to the "good ol'" days when only professionals had access and there wasn't much abuse going on.

Meanwhile, many companies, from small businesses to worldwide corporations, are spending a lot of money to fight spam and other problems. I see a need for many large businesses to get together and build their own network, an "Internet-3" so to speak. They would still have security concerns, but because most of the network's traffic will be business related, the signal to noise ratio will be much better.

With wireless access becoming more popular, I even see the normal consumer providing pieces of the Internet. This network, the original Internet, might eventually become the place where a lot of garbage goes around, while private worldwide networks might eventually keep things clean.

Of course, once all these networks become large, I can see connections made between them, and that will defeat the whole purpose.

Re:Politically odd? (sorry, OT)

[afidel]

As of this week China can be officially declared a FORMER communist country. The upper house introduced a bill that is sure to pass guarenteeing private property rights. This is the end of any idea of communism in China and the beginning of their own brand of socialist capatalism more along the lines of Europe.

Re:Politically odd? (sorry, OT)

[JonMartin]

Don't you mean a quasi capitalist totalitarian regime? China is nothing like Europe, and still doesn't respect human rights. If anything, it'll become a model for what corporations want America to be like: a country ruled by the corporations for the corporations with no rights given to the individual.

Close, but it is a country ruled by the military backed elite for the corporations with no rights given to the individual. We have a word for this merging of totalitarianism and corporatism: fascism. The only deviation from the standard definition of fascism is the absence of a single, demigod-like leader (ie. Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin). Though it could be argued that the memory of Mao serves this purpose.

Regardless, the person who compared China to Europe is spectacularly stupid. Unless they meant Europe of the 1930s.