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.'"

Comments

Re:Station wagon full of backup tapes

[IWannaBeAnAC]

I don't think so. One DVD in 4 seconds... how many DVD's can you fit in a stationwagon? A few thousand at least (probably 10's of thousands). Each thousand DVD's gives you an hour to drive to the destination to meet the bandwidth requirements.

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....

Distance is as impressive as speed

[erick99]

The distance of approximately 9,800 miles is as impressive as the speed. The article did not mention how many devices (i.e. switches, gateways, etc.) that the data passed through from site to site.

Cheers,

Erick

Re:Windows..

[dk.r*nger]

Why don't they do this test with an OS like *BSD (or Linux), with its highly-tuned networking stack?

Because Microsoft has a marketing budget and Caltech/CERN don't give a rats ass what software it runs when it's the network infrastructure they're showing off..

Re:This sounds great!

[GreyPoopon]

Pray, what's the point in adopting a standard today, that most common devices that need internet access (read PCs) can't even dream of attaining?

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.

Achieving equivalent Disk I/O

[digid]

What kind of equipment is needed to achieve the necessary Disk I/O to match the network throughput?

Re:Station wagon full of backup tapes

[Rostin]

I think that to be fair, the DVDs would have to be burned at the point of origin and then read at the destination.

Give me mass storage of that throughput...

[Vo0k]

I'm sick of waiting 2 mins to transfer a DIVX movie to a different partition.
For us, average nerds, if we ever got connection that fast, it would still feel slow because of our storage speed. :P

Re:wow

[Lt Cmdr Tuvok]

how much bandwidth does doom3 need for network gaming?

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.

Re:wow

[Illserve]

Oh Cmon.

Giving the average person access to a "compound computational device" would be about the biggest waste of resources in human history.