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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.'"
Most desktops don't have that much bandwith on their FSB!!
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
Explaining it like that is likely to draw the wrong sort of attention - How long until Jack Valenti and his crew of RIAA/MPAA thugs descend on this new menace to their livelihoods?
Incidentally, for some reason gmail has decided to give me 12 invites - they will go to the first 12 logged in posters telling a funny joke involving ESR or RMS, bonus points for use of ASCII.
Making the moon less necessary since 1998.
This is straight from the article:
Internet2 is fast -- Abilene, a U.S. cross-country backbone network, blasts data at 10Gbps. But transoceanic networking is another story. There are hardware and software issues to overcome, Gray said.
For example, one limiting factor is that the fastest available interface for PCs is the PCIX64 Bus Isolation Extender, which can only handle 7.5Gbps.
So... Let me get this straight... The problem these guys have is that they are using PC to connect to, and send data on, Internet2?
I remember a time when "serious" CS researchers would not touch a PC with a ten-feet pole. Times have changed, indeed.
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
This is my pet peeve...
This is NOT a measure of SPEED, but of FLOW RATE!!!
The article doesn't seem to say what protocol was used. I was hoping to find out if it was TCP or TCP based like iSCSI or something lower level. If it's lower level. The second thing is about the s2io card. I'd like to know if it has true TCP offload capability like stateful packet handling and processing, ie: strip headers off at NIC level and dma to host memory. Even S2IO's site doesn't elaborate on that. Anyone know?
From a business perspective, think of how this could change distribution. Instead of having to ship DVDs to your local Blockbuster, Blockbuster could have their stores hooked up to the net and just download the DVD's their customers request.
"Oh, no more copies of Passion of the Christ on the shelf? Hang on a couple of minutes while I burn one for you..."
Definitely beneficial! We could take Tribes 2 or Quake, or the like and build entire simulated armies. Instead of actually killing people we could simulate wars and just abide by the results.
And you thought computer games were bad. They may save us from extinction.
What kind of equipment is needed to achieve the necessary Disk I/O to match the network throughput?
I suspect that a 16 disk RAID 0 array of high speed disks could keep up with this. However, I think you'd need a pretty specialised computer system to keep up with such an array. I'm not sure what kind of architecture you'd need, but I am convinced it would involve multiple I/O buses and some kind of crossbar arrangement for shared access between DMA controllers. Memory would have to be interleaved carefully also.
Chances are they were transferring localhost:/dev/zero to remote:/dev/null.
Parallel computing is the forseeable future of computing. If you have sufficient bandwidth across the internet, it only makes sense to share computing resources between people. Just think about how it could help gentoo users :)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I agree that bandwidth is great, but applications like distributed file systems are much more sensitive to high latency. Any stats on Internet2 latency?