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NetBSD Sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record

Daniel de Kok writes "Researchers of the Swedish University Network (SUNET) have beaten the Internet2 Land Speed Record using two Dell 2650 machines with single 2GHz CPUs running NetBSD 2.0 Beta. SUNET has transferred around 840 GigaBytes of data in less than 30 minutes, using a single IPv4 TCP stream, between a host at the Luleå University of Technology and a host connected to a Sprint PoP in San Jose, CA, USA. The achieved speed was 69.073 Petabit-meters/second. According to the research team, NetBSD was chosen 'due to the scalability of the TCP code.'"

"More information about this record including the NetBSD configuration can be found at: http://proj.sunet.se/LSR2/
The website of the Internet2 Land Speed Record (I2-LSR) competition is located at: http://lsr.internet2.edu/"

8 of 336 comments (clear)

  1. because by Triumph+The+Insult+C · · Score: 5, Informative

    "According to the Internet2 LSR contest rule #5A, IPv4 TCP single stream"

    --
    vodka, straight up, thank you!
  2. Reliable data transfer was more important? by Xenographic · · Score: 4, Informative

    Perhaps because they wanted the data to arrive reliably?

    UDP just sends off the data without caring whether it actually arrives intact at the other end, you know. TCP, on the other hand, actually gives delivery guarantees...

  3. Re:Correct me if I'm wrong... by AKAImBatman · · Score: 5, Informative

    True. However, the various stacks have diversified a lot since the original BSD 4.4 stack. As a result, many of the TCP/IP stacks have different performance characteristics and features. AFAIK, the three main BSDs have kept their stacks in sync because they've been sharing code. A stack from NetBSD should be almost the same as a stack from FreeBSD.

  4. Re:Well, not having RTFA... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    I'm betting it's not a "land" speed record, seeing as how the data probably jumps through the air (satillite/microwave transmissions) at one or more points.

    Nope. The vast majority of phone & data runs over fiber, without satellite or microwave. The latency on satellite is much worse, & microwave is more expensive. Fiber is the first choice.

    (Not to mention the fact that being on, over, or under the surface of land or water means nothing to a data cable.)

    Well, back when I worked for JDS Uniphase during the tech boom, there was a world of difference. Getting parts qualified for underwater cables was much harder. The cable owners don't want to have to send out a ship to pull a cable up off the ocean floor to fix it - it's very very expensive.

    JDS had to guarrantee that they would make no changes in its production process without the approval of the customer, and JDS had to get similar guarrantees from its suppliers. Of course, JDS charged a lot more for undersea components, but reliability was much more important than cost.

    And many customers would demand that the parts be made in North America - they wouldn't accept made in China or Taiwan.

    Sigh. I miss working at JDS.

  5. Re:Correct me if I'm wrong... by AKAImBatman · · Score: 4, Informative

    Perhaps you should tell that to the guy who wrote the windows stack. He's posted before saying that it is not bsd.

    Better double check that.

  6. Re:I've always wondered about Internet2 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Internet2 is a separate network in the same sense that Sprint and UUNET are separate networks. It's funded for academic use, and has a rigourously-enforced AUP which results in it not being used for commercial purposes at all. It is not an upgrade of the current Internet. The name "Internet2" does not signify "the replacement for the Internet"; if you're being charitible, it means "let's see how people use a multi-gigabit network if they don't have to pay for traffic". If you're being mean, it means "let's see if we can attract federal funding by sounding like we're exciting and important."

    Many commercial networks (Level3 and UUNET spring immediately to mind) run commercial networks which are far closer to the bleeding edge than Internet2 is, in terms of the complexity of the routing system and the forwarding path. There are commercial operators who operate parallel 8xOC192 circuits which are routinely filled to near-congestion conditions 80% of the time (yes, that's an aggregate of 80Gbit/s between just two sites). The Internet is orders of magnitude more complex and advanced in terms of forwarding capacity than Internet2. There are commercial ISPs who sell production IPv6 services. There are more commercial ISPs who sell production IPv4 multicast services.

    No ISPs will migrate to Internet2, since Internet2 is funded specifically for non-commercial traffic. There are no "bridges" between the private network known as "Internet2" and the Internet in the way that you imply; there are simply universities who are connected both to the private network called "Internet2" and to the Internet via commercial providers.

    The private network known as "Internet2" is not an IPv6-only network. It does not feature a policy of shipping IPv4 traffic purely encapsulated within IPv6.

    Hope this clears up a couple of things.

  7. Re:Correct me if I'm wrong... by nr · · Score: 4, Informative

    Yep, Windows did use BSD stack back in the days of NT 3.5 and 4.0, but the stack has since then been rewritten from scratch, Windows 2000 and XP does not contain BSD stack.

    And Linux does not use BSD stack eighter. Linux kernel hackers have written their own stack too.

  8. Re:Why NetBSD was chosen by ragge · · Score: 5, Informative

    Actually, we did tests with Linux (both 2.4 and 2.6) and FreeBSD also, but with not as good results. Linux IP stack eats much more CPU (and memory!) than it should. Basic problem is the network buffer implementation (or the lack of!). This is true for both 2.4 and 2.6. A redesign is needed of the IP stack to make it perform better. FreeBSD have a lot of linear searches in their IP stack left, fixing that would most likely give the same result as for NetBSD. I may port over some of the NetBSD changes if I get some spare time. NetBSD had already fixed (most of) those problems, some of them long ago, therefore it was simple to just use it.