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Internet2 Speed Record Broken
RevKa writes "InternetNews.com has a report of a new Internet2 land-speed record. The old record was nearly cut in half: the two parties, California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), 'transferred 859 gigabytes of data in less than 17 minutes.'
InternetNews goes on to say, 'This record speed of 6.63Gbps is equivalent to transferring a full-length DVD movie in four seconds.' Various scientific purposes were mentioned 'as well as commercial applications from entertainment to oil and gas exploration.'
The article ended with hardware specs 'S2io's Xframe 10 GbE server adapter, Cisco 7600 Series Routers, Newisys 4300 servers using AMD Opteron processors, Itanium servers and the 64-bit version of Windows Server 2003.'"
Why don't they do this test with an OS like *BSD (or Linux), with its highly-tuned networking stack?
Except, that I don't think you can drive from CERN to CalTech, even with a few days to do it ;) So, you might actually be right! But they still have a tremendous way to go to exceed the bandwidth of a supertanker....
Cheers,
Erick
http://www.busyweather.com/
Remember that this is an experiment, and getting speeds like these into widespread availability is pretty far in the future. By the time such speeds are available, the computing power to take advantage of them probably will be too. If they don't start the research now, we'll have very powerful computers that come to a screeching halt everytime they have to retrieve data from the 'net.
GreyPoopon
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Why is it I can write insightful comments but can't come up with a clever signature?
To complete the task you have to load each dvd onto the target computer. I think you are slower now.
What kind of equipment is needed to achieve the necessary Disk I/O to match the network throughput?
I think that to be fair, the DVDs would have to be burned at the point of origin and then read at the destination.
That may be true. However, how long do you think it would take to burn those tens of thousands of DVDs that you're going to transport in the station wagon.
I'm sick of waiting 2 mins to transfer a DIVX movie to a different partition. :P
For us, average nerds, if we ever got connection that fast, it would still feel slow because of our storage speed.
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
It is typical of humans to focus primarily on the ways in which new technology can be utilized for 'fun'. Computer games are a particularily ubiquitous example of this phenomenon. Massively networked computers have the potential to become the greatest compound computational device that mankind has ever had access to. If only the proper effort were expended, multiple paralell processing tasks could quite easily be run on this supernetwork. The combined power of this cluster would thus be beneficial to all.
There is slim hope that this will happen, at least in the foreseeable future, human logic being as flawed as it indeed is.
Without the darkness, how would we recognize the light?
I would like to know the benefits this sort of bandwith testing brings about. Does it help determine bottlenecks in current technologies? Help determine roadmaps for future techs? Or is this just some testosterone releasing between researchers? :)
I remember a time when "serious" CS researchers would not touch a PC with a ten-feet pole. Times have changed, indeed.
Because advancement is market driven and PCs are where the money is. That's probably the fastest price / performance bus they can get. Research institutions aren't made of money (unfortunately).
"There is slim hope that this will happen, at least in the foreseeable future, human logic being as flawed as it indeed is."
Ah. So, what will this superior form of logic gain us? With a super-efficient system we could solve all sorts of problems and extend our lives and enrich ourselves, allowing us to have longer to enjoy...wait a minute, you're complaining because we'd rather be able to enjoy ourselves, which appears to be the point anyway, than to not enjoy ourselves for a while so that we can later enjoy ourselves as we would have been doing anyway.
Perhaps you could explain your 'unflawed logic' sometime?
Oh Cmon.
Giving the average person access to a "compound computational device" would be about the biggest waste of resources in human history.
Seems to me that everything we do in life it to have more fun. Why is technology beneficial to us, because it makes our lives more "fun" or gives us more time to have fun. If it weren't fun why would we want all this technology to extend our boring lives.
Who said research wasn't supposed to be fun?
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
These Internet speed record experiments are interesting, but the issue of scale is rarely addressed. Okay, so a team of researchers were able to go faster than the speed of bad news, but what happens when the server load is a bit higher than just one transfer?
Or does Internet2 use some exotic de-centralized transfer method that renders the paradigm of servers laughably obsolete?
Happiness is relative, Based upon the way we live.
They needed data. They started with DVDs they owned, but a few dozen only added up to about 1/8 of what they wanted. Renting was too expensive and they were worn out from ripping the first 12. The solution was obvious ...
The connected the Winblows 2003 server and used it to collect data. Within minutes, it was rooted and it's reputation for good network connectivity spread quickly. In a day or two, the multiple terabyte array was filled with music, movies, porn and warez. The data was then transfered to reasonable hardware and the test was performed.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.