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

wow

[Anonymous Coward]

how much bandwidth does doom3 need for network gaming?

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

[AviLazar]

Dude...your Vulcan speak is freaking me out man... ;)

Re:wow

[qray]

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.

Re:wow

[Jameth]

"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?

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.

Re:wow

[antic]

"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."

Great idea, but only if Diebold gets to orchestrate the simulation...

Re:wow

[matthewsmalley]

Isn't that a roundabout way of saying:
Imagine a beowulf cluster of ...

Re:wow

[cpghost]

Who said research wasn't supposed to be fun?

Re:wow

[Not_Wiggins]

Welcome to "Skynet." 8)

Re:wow

[mkeroppi]

I guess war is fun...

Re:wow

[timts]

doom3 network doesnot need much bandwidth and very few people would play it for now. since it supports too few players, the maps are all too small so it would be no fun.
it's mostly a single player game
on the other hand, is there any harddrive can handle this download speed? so they just save it in memory? or just conceptually "received" those data?

Re:wow

[drinkypoo]

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 :)

Re:wow

[RubberChainsaw]

Wouldn't a massive "compound computational device" utilize resources more efficiently? Instead of each average person having their own Ghz computer, which is rarely put to its peak usage, everyone would be sharing the collective processing power of all the computers. Then all that processing power, which normally sits alone, in the dark, taken up by millions of System Idle Processes is isntead used by professors and students and people with need.

right?

Re:wow

[b0neman]

Um... the *ONLY* question is how does this relate to the transmission and utilization of p0rn? We all know that all multimedia and data transmission progress on the Internet is largely driven by p0rn. Back before WWW, 2400baud was good enough to exchange a few FIDOnet messages and run some good BBS's. It wasn't until someone figured out that we like to whackit to streaming videos of Asia Carrera that major advances in speed were promoted and made profitable. I can think of no greater benefit to mankind than a high speed download of every Girls Gone Wild DVD to my waiting hard drive at home in less than 10 minutes.

Re:wow

[valmont]

thank you mr comicbookstoreguy.

worst ... post ... evaaahrh.

Re:wow

[Kolgoth]

Until all the /.-ians decide to start running Seti@Home and Prime95 over this "shared resource" network... Unused CPU cycles? PSH!

Re:wow

[Tarential]

"Instead of actually killing people we could simulate wars and just abide by the results."

Why would we want the Koreans to rule the world?

Re:wow

[timeOday]

Parallel computing is the forseeable future of computing.

Distributed parallel computing, on the other hand, may be entirely pointless.

It all depends on the relative expense of computation vs bandwidth - not just bandwidth, but bandwidth + all the other hassles, expenses, and technicalities of distributed computing.

So far it's almost always easier (cheaper) to put together the computational resources you need than to put together a network giving you the same capabilities using others' computers.

Re:wow

[True Grit]

Hmm, how about America's Army with oh, say 20,000 of your closest friends..... :]

Re:wow

[Alchemeron]

"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."

That's the exact premise of the 1967 Star Trek episode, "A Taste of Armageddon".

Ironic to independently come up with that idea in response to someone with a name patterned from Star Trek.

Station wagon full of backup tapes

[RollingThunder]

I think we've well surpassed what a station wagon full of backup tapes can do now....

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....

Re:Station wagon full of backup tapes

[real_smiff]

supertankers are very slow. they have very bad latency. and do these DVDs have cases? :p

Re:Station wagon full of backup tapes

[Anonymous Coward]

To complete the task you have to load each dvd onto the target computer. I think you are slower now.

Re:Station wagon full of backup tapes

[pinko-rat-bastard]

What Mr. Tanenbaum failed to acknowledge, however, is that the time it takes to *restore* those tapes once they have arrived could well exceed the time it took to transport them. A station wagon full of backup tapes sitting in the parking lot is pretty useless.

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.

Re:Station wagon full of backup tapes

[nmk]

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.

Re:Station wagon full of backup tapes

[beef3k]

Yes, except it'll take you 2-3 weeks to

a) Burn all those DVD's
b) copy them back in at the destination

Re:Station wagon full of backup tapes

[IWannaBeAnAC]

Yes, but that can be massively parallelized. The total time taken need only be the time to burn & read 1 DVD.

Re:Station wagon full of backup tapes

[Gunzour]

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..."

Re:Station wagon full of backup tapes

[maxwell demon]

You forgot the time to first write all that data onto the DVDs, and to read it in on the other side. Without those steps, your computer-to-computer data transfer is not complete. Now, how large would the DVD burner farm have to be to beat the transfer rate?

Re:Station wagon full of backup tapes

[conufsed]

Yeah but the latency of the station wagon is kinda bad

Re:Station wagon full of backup tapes

[ElvenMonkey]

link that up with technology such at decaying DVDs and you're sorted.

Re:Station wagon full of backup tapes

[AviLazar]

Ok, now all of you realize that all this speak of transporting DVD copies through interstate highways, as well as through international borders must be breaking a ton of laws here right?
Now lets quell this speak about illegal actions that are typically in the hands of the EVIL mafia and return to our regularly scheduled programs of "backing up" our DVD movies. :)

Re:Station wagon full of backup tapes

[PMuse]

When calculating the bandwidth of a station wagon, don't forget to count the load time to get all that data loaded to the target computer. Online transfers usually get data all the way to destination, not just into the parking lot.

Re:Station wagon full of backup tapes

[zijus]

Hum... Not really "back-up" though. The kind of data which are gonna be produced at CERN in LHC won't be backed up : just too big.

The point of those super fast transfer rates is that probably experiment data will _not_ be stored at CERN at all, just produced and sent straight to storage farmes. Hopefully organisation will be clean enough to avoid more transfere after first storage. The goal beeing : stored where it's gonna be analysed.

I worked a while within the ALICE experiment off-line software section at CERN in 1999-2000. The proportion of problemes are just mind blowing. Some experiment generates so much data at each run that a single extra bit used to store a raw data, immediatly translates into 10th of extra disks required. One run is at max a few seconds. As fare as I remember, ALICE ( A Large Ion Colider Experiment) will generate on it's own 1PB a year. The why of it is: as opposed to colide e-/e+, this experiment will colide nucleus. We could see it as: colide two car side mirors and you get X by-products. But now, colide not the miror only but the whole cars: you get magnitude of order more by-products to observe. The goal , as fare as I rember is to observe some Quark-Gluon-Plasma (QGP), a gas of quark and gluon. It's the fifth state of mater we know about.

Some lads in slashdot thread mentionne p0rn... But just a single peta byte is equivalent of what has been said and written ever by humanity. We'd have to generate a lot of pOrn/mp3s/... to have that much data. Or maybe set up ALIPE ( A Large Intricate P0rn Experiment.)...

Z.

Re:Station wagon full of backup tapes

[Overzeetop]

With HD media being so cheap, how about loading up your station wagon with HDs?

Besides, the stationwagon has a far higher total capacity throughput than the server. To get a station wagon's full of data, you'd have to swap the media at the front and back end of the I2 link, too.

Re:Station wagon full of backup tapes

[glpierce]

Well, if you have tens of thousands of burners at one end and tens of thousands of drives at the other, and tens of thousands of technicians running things, I'd say a matter a minutes to do the whole lot.

Re:Station wagon full of backup tapes

[Ryosen]

>>I think we've well surpassed what a station wagon full of backup tapes can do now...

However, we're still left with the problems of what to do with that station wagon full of DVDs and how to handle the late fees at Blockbuster.

Re:Station wagon full of backup tapes

[Teun]

Won't work, CERN is European DVD region 2, Caltech is North American DVD region 1.
You can tipically only change this code 5 times before it locks up.

At least that's what the *IAA's would like us to believe :)

Re:Station wagon full of backup tapes

[Spetiam]

We've at least well surpassed what my hard drive can keep up with.

Re:Station wagon full of backup tapes

[ivow]

What about filling up the wagon with fiber channel SAN's?

btw: I think we're forgetting that fold out seat in the back of the station wagon.

Re:Station wagon full of backup tapes

[uss_valiant]

Not quite, here's what Andrew S. Tanenbaum writes in "Computer Networks, Fourth Edition":

[...]A simple calculation will make this point clear. An industry standard Ultrium tape can hold 200 gigabytes. A box of 60 x 60 x 60 cm [approx. 2 x 2 x 2 feet] can hold about 1000 of these tapes, for a total capacity of 200 terabytes, or 1600 terabits (1.6 petabits). A box of tapes can be delivered anywhere in the United States in 24 hours by Federal Express and other companies. The effective bandwidth of this transmission is 1600 terabits/86'400 sec, or 19 Gbps. If the destination is only an hour away by road, the bandwidth is increased to over 400 Gbps. No computer network can even approach this.
[...]
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway.

Re:Station wagon full of backup tapes

[da_fiend]

You'd have to be extremely nimble to load a new DVD disc every four seconds.

On the other hand I knoew all that gameboy tetris practice would come in handy some day

Re:Station wagon full of backup tapes

[Stephen Samuel]

We're talking bandwidth, not Latency. You from SCO or something?

Re:Station wagon full of backup tapes

[ksheff]

But this will make it very easy for researchers at CERN and CalTech to share their DVD and CD collections w/o having to make the trip.

Re:Station wagon full of backup tapes

[theManInTheYellowHat]

Can you imagine how long it would take to write that many tapes and then read them back.

That is where this exercise is most amazing to me. The distance is excelent as well but 859 gigabytes writen and read (I assume that they actually did something with the data after they got it) in 17 minutes.

Re:Station wagon full of backup tapes

[Donny Smith]

That's cute but it doesn't work that way because to backup shit to tapes and read it off those tapes you'd definitively need more time than network copy.

Re:Station wagon full of backup tapes

[Toresica]

Well, if you have tens of thousands of burners at one end and tens of thousands of drives at the other, and tens of thousands of technicians running thing

Hmm.... I wonder whether they're hiring...

Re:Station wagon full of backup tapes

[Toresica]

All you need for that are a lot of really big hard drives at the Blockbuster stores.

Re:Station wagon full of backup tapes

[Toresica]

Online transfers usually get data all the way to destination, not just into the parking lot.

They do? It may just be the particular group of people I send files to, but sometimes when I send files they don't make it all the way into people's brains...

Re:Station wagon full of backup tapes

[krack]

It is now a 747 full of backup tapes.

This sounds great!

[jkrise]

Most desktops don't have that much bandwith on their FSB!!

Re:This sounds great!

[jmcmunn]

Most desktops wouldn't have been able to transmit data for 17 minute without sending stuff twice...for that matter, most desktops wouldn't be able to transfer data for 3 minutes without sending stuff twice.

Re:This sounds great!

[jkrise]

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?

-

Re:This sounds great!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes they have. Even the Pentium III had 8.5Gbps of FSB bandwidth. Pentium 4 has 51.2Gbps of FSB and memory bandwidth.

Re:This sounds great!

[animaal]

Cuz those speeds won't be in Joe Sixpack's house for quite a few years yet, and by then, PCs might be a bit faster.

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.

Re:This sounds great!

[Anonymous Coward]

Well... Let's see, an LTO-2 drive can spool at 35GBps (that's bytes not bits) a StorageTek L700 can house 20 of them, that's 700GBps (which is approx 5600Gbps) your LTO-2 tape can store 200Gb native, err... I'm getting boared with the maths now, but you get the idea...

Re:This sounds great!

[hojo]

...we'll have very powerful computers that come to a screeching halt everytime they have to retrieve data from the 'net.

Exactly like today.

Face it, things are never going to get better (relatively speaking) as far as wide network speed and latency goes. No matter how fast things are on the network, it's always going to suck compared to our desktop/laptop/palmtop/whatever machines' internal workings.

Re:This sounds great!

[JamesKPolk]

What's the point of limiting technology to things that Joe Sixpack needs?

The average home NEVER needs to transport a ton of goods. Shall we not build trucks and ships that can?

Re:This sounds great!

[afidel]

ERROR: Order of magnitude problem
With a transfer rate of 60 MB/sec, the Ultrium 460 is the ideal choice for enterprise-class data protection needs. linky

So, real numbers are max 1.2GB/s or 12Gb/s for the L700, not bad, but not that much faster than this transfer. And with the tapes you still have to transport them to the destination to make the comparison fair.

Re:This sounds great!

[Stephen Samuel]

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?

Those sorts of speeds aren't meant for delivery to the curb.. They're for intercity communication. (read: Backbone connections). Remember that large ISPs were using multiple hundred megabit OC3 connections back when the standard desktop speed was in the 28-56Kilobit range

DVD speed

[Gunzour]

'This record speed of 6.63Gbps is equivalent to transferring a full-length DVD movie in four seconds.'

Yeah, that's the message we want to convey to the MPAA. Everyone knows the Internet2 is all about pirating DVDs.

Re:DVD speed

[hasdikarlsam]

Who cares what it's good for?

I want one!

Re:DVD speed

[jkrise]

Think how much faster we can get our Service packs from Microsoft! Download in less than a second - but rebooting would take ages..... groan ;-(

-

Re:DVD speed

[Mad Leper]

Even better, the fact that this is not the first article to refer to network speeds as "DVDs per second/minute/hour" It must piss off the MPAA and RIAA when the media uses DVD/MP3 as a benchmark for network performance.

Re:DVD speed

[hype7]

Yeah, that's the message we want to convey to the MPAA. Everyone knows the Internet2 is all about pirating DVDs.

Someone give Jack Valenti a call! His exit interview was linked off here just a few days ago, and he said:
If everything stayed just as it is right now, we could probably survive it, because even with broadband it takes at least an hour to bring down a movie. But I visited the labs at Caltech, and they're running an experiment called FAST where they can bring down a DVD-quality movie in 5 seconds. The director told me it could be operative in the market in 18 months. Well, my face blanched.

I wanna know what his face does when he finds out we can now do it in under 5 seconds :D It sure couldn't get any uglier than it already is.

Anyway, don't let him quit before someone tells him!

-- james

Re:DVD speed

[Alpha_Traveller]

You mean that's NOT what it's for? Sorry, had to say that. Okay, so when does I2 become mainstream? Why doesn't COVAD support it yet?

Re:DVD speed

[mbbac]

DVDs are digital versatile discs. They do have other uses besides movies. I think the measurement was meant to convey how much faster this transmission was than sending the same data backed up to DVDs which is the highest capacity recordable media most familiar to the general public.

Re:DVD speed

[darc]

>'This record speed of 6.63Gbps is equivalent to transferring a full-length DVD movie in four seconds.'

Sheesh. Whatever happened to the last benchmark unit? Libraries of Congresses? All you kids and your new fangled metric system... DVD units. Back in my day, we were sued by BOOK publishers! Not some crazy eight track industry. Those were some REAL copyrights.

*prattles*

Re:DVD speed

[Anonymous Coward]

"This record speed of 6.63Gbps is equivalent to transferring a full-length DVD movie in four seconds."

Upon hearing this The MPAA and CEO's of all major movie studios took a collective shit in their pants.

Re:DVD speed

[PMuse]

'This record speed of 6.63Gbps is equivalent to transferring a full-length DVD movie in four seconds.'

Yeah, that's the message we want to convey to the MPAA. Everyone knows the Internet2 is all about pirating DVDs.

You're pitching it wrong. What we tell the MPAA is, "See, with Internet2, you can sell a whole movie every 5 seconds."

Re:DVD speed

[ImaLamer]

Maybe the good thing is TVoIP.

Hey, I should trademark that...

Right now I can't afford both DSL and Cable TV. Which do you think I picked?

Anything that puts another option out there is good. Now I know that we won't be seeing these speeds to our homes, it just gives me hope. My monitor has excellent resolution and I'm all for streaming television. I'm already sitting here all day - streaming audio gets old.

If the MPAA was smart, which they usually aren't, they would support this with their minds on movie rentals. Who needs Netflix? Three days is too long to wait for a movie which may not even be the one you want.

Message to the MPAA, don't go the RIAA route. Don't wait for the market to create itself through piracy. Actually I already enjoy this with Starz! on demand (or whatever it's called). I can download whatever is showing on TV, all month for 14 bucks. Good deal considering it's more movies than I can watch. Plus they all start when I want to and I can control it like a PVR.

not bad...

[Slashbot Hive-Mind]

here are some other records (taken from here:

Current Records
IPv6 Category

Single Stream Class: 46,156 terabit-meters per second by a team consisting of members from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and CERN across 10,949 kilometers of network.

Multiple Stream Class: 46,156 terabit-meters per second by a team consisting of members from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and CERN across 10,949 kilometers of network.

IPv4 Category

Single Stream Class: 69,073 terabit-meters per second by a team consisting of members from the SUNET, the organization for the national higher research and education network (NREN) of Sweden, and Sprint across 16,343 kilometers of network.

Multiple Stream Class: 104,528 terabit-meters per second by a team consisting of members from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and CERN by sending 859 gigabytes of data across 15,766 kilometers of network in 1037 seconds (just over 17 minutes), for an average rate of 6.63 gigabits per second.

Re:not bad...

[drinkypoo]

That's interesting, for IPv6 the single and multiple stream records are the same, but for IPv4 the single-stream is considerably slower. I'd very much like to see an explanation of why this is so.

B.T.

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like the perfect BT seed to me.

Re:B.T.

[Jumpin' Jon]

Please... NEVER used the abbreviation BT in a thread about comms.

It gives us Brits a bowel-shaking shudder when we think of how British Telecom are going to ruin t'Internet 2 at some point in the distant future when it becomes available to the masses.

/insensitive clod

Ta ta,
JJ

In tomorrow's news ...

[sawb]

.... the RIAA and MPAA sue Internet2 as being a potential source for copyright violations by being able to steal a movie in 4 seconds or an album in 0.0003 seconds.

Re:In tomorrow's news ...

[jkrise]

and users of internet2 would be sued for possessing the equivalent of 6.83 billion CD writers!

Re:In tomorrow's news ...

[PMuse]

Actually, MPAA/RIAA might just stop messing around and start calculating the BIG damages. Next press release:

"It has long been established that most blank media is used for piracy. The legislatures have wisely acted to provide compensation to our rights holders for all blank media sold."

"However, we have been remiss in not realizing that, like blank media, network bandwidth is also mostly used for piracy. Accordingly, we are today introducing a bill to compensate our rights holders for the piracy that is certainly occurring over unlicensed bandwidth. A tax of $0.01/MB will be levied on all network transmissions except those originating directly from our licensed content distributors."

Re:In tomorrow's news ...

[tepples]

"A tax of $0.01/MB will be levied on all network transmissions except those originating directly from our licensed content distributors."

Of course, if the country has any sort of constitution guaranteeing freedom of speech, copyright law will allow any copyright owner to join the royalty pool. This is already the case with sound recordings and blank Music CD-R media.

Re:In tomorrow's news ...

[eliasen]

And here I was all impressed with our petty 2 gigabits/sec that we have for our internet-based television station that just launched today. Umm... can I get one of these installed in my studio? It would let more people see our staggering hotties. :)

Oh-oh.

[King_of_Prussia]

'This record speed of 6.63Gbps is equivalent to transferring a full-length DVD movie in four seconds.'

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.

Re:Oh-oh.

[gowen]

Here's a hilarious one :

"Today I am one of the senior technical cadre that makes the Internet work, and a core Linux and open-source developer."

---Eric S. Raymond

Needless to say, it's typical self aggrandisement

Re:Oh-oh.

[BigDumbAnimal]

...posters telling a funny joke involving ESR or RMS...

This will hurt a lot of people's chances.

Re:Oh-oh.

[kahei]

Okay, not a joke per se but kind of funny/sad -- RMS objected to the use of 'win' as a prefix to function names in the windows-specific source files in emacs. Seems the connotations of 'win' are too positive to be used in a function name that will only be called on an MS OS.

I forget whether they were changed, as that was the thing that made me give up on emacs :)

Re:Oh-oh.

[meringuoid]

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.

I think gmail must have just hit some kind of critical density; I finally got my invite last week, and since then I've been seeing them offered just about everywhere.

That's exponential growth for you, though... I've invited three people in myself already, and I imagine they've got invites of their own by now. I doubt Google will ever need to officially open gmail to the general public; in a couple of months the number of invites in circulation will probably exceed six billion :-)

Re:Oh-oh.

[Anonymous Coward]

They're growing in stages. For perhaps the last 2 months almost NOBODY I knew with a gmail account had invites to give away. Now within say, the last 4 days we all have loads.

They're ready for the next step up in users, I'd guess.

Re:Oh-oh.

[ch3]

What do you get when you cross the Atlantic Ocean with the RMS Titanic? Half Way
Oh sorry, you meant Richard Stalman? ;)

Re:Oh-oh.

[IsaacW]

Yeah, but did he recommend something ridiculous, like using "tehSuckOS" or perhaps "Micro$loth" as the prefix instead? Can you even use the dollar sign in C/C++ names?

Re:Oh-oh.

[Slightly Askew]

Q: Why couldn't the ESR scientist ever get a date?

A: Because he was such a Bohr! (explanation)

Oh, you didn't mean Electron Spin Resonance? Sorry.

Re:Oh-oh.

[harmonica]

They're growing in stages. For perhaps the last 2 months almost NOBODY I knew with a gmail account had invites to give away.

About a month ago I got five invites to give out, about two weeks ago another six.

Re:Oh-oh.

[MooseGuy529]

Need an invite? I have 6. But the reason there are a lot out is that they gave out increasing numbers a while ago (2, 3, 4, 6-ish), then turned it off since they had a huge increase in support messages (and simultaneously stopped sending a personal reply to each question and began only replying to questions where there was an answer). I guess they have caught up now and they want to get closer to going public with it by getting more users--for load-testing, testing quirky browser configurations (that wouldn't show up in a limited beta-test), etc...

Re:Oh-oh.

[RWerp]

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?

You realize they would be messing with guys who keep antimatter paper weights in their offices?

Re:Oh-oh.

[Stephen Samuel]

A lawyer for SCO hands RMS a subpoena. RMS reads it for a moment and hands it back to the lawyer.

"I'm sorry, I can't accept this."
"Why not?"
"I can't give one to all of my friends"

Re:Oh-oh.

[menace3society]

Well, I'm not sure why I'd want to post a joke about my college's graduate program in religion, but here's something from my logic class....

Teacher: Symbolic logic is useful for programming, since it teaches you the importance of details, like commas and semicolons are important in programming.
Me, to neighbor: isn't that why God invented LISP?
Neighbor: okay, so now you have to worry about details like parentheses.
Me: Nah, that's why God invented EMACS.
Neighbor: WTF, if RMS is God, how come M$ still exists?
Me: I don't know, free will?

Okay, so the first remark was funnier than the actual joke. Sue me.

Re:Oh-oh.

[MarkByers]

Yes please!! Do I need to tell a joke? My email is muzzy@muzzy.dk

Re:Oh-oh.

[MooseGuy529]

No, because I have nothing to fill in for the name, and you're posting as an anonymous coward, and the base 10 log of your username has a higher integer portion than mine.

Evil plan

[Libor Vanek]

1, Manage to transfer your data at 6.63Gbps
2, ???
3, Profit!

Re:Evil plan

[Stevyn]

Ever hear of iTunes?

Re:Evil plan

[Cyb3r]

Step 2: Finding clients with alot of data

Re:Evil plan

[RevKa]

no, what is it?

HAHAHA!

[StevenHenderson]

[Mark Cuban] believes that the solution to movie piracy is bigger file formats.

Haha. Silly Mark Cuban. Pirates will always prevail in the face of adversity (and high-density media). :)

Windows..

[Quixote]

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

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:Windows..

[Errtu76]

because nobody pirates stuff in linux :P

Re:Windows..

[fdisk3hs]

The last record a few months ago was set on NetBSD. It's a game of leapfrog.

Re:Windows..

[ozzmosis]

well, they did.

Re:Windows..

[Ray Dassen]

Earlier speed records were set using configurations running
Debian GNU/Linux and
NetBSD.

I guess it primarily depends on what the participating partners are comfortable with.

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:Distance is as impressive as speed

[hey!]

Well, not really. If you can move N GB/s 1000 miles, you can move it almost as easily 9800 miles, provided you have the fiber optics to do it.

The raw speed is impressive. Consistently getting a tenth of that rate rate through many hops in a dynamically shifting network for some time would be impressive. Ordering up the stream and getting it back within a guaranteed latency over that distance would be impressive. Increasing the distance is, well a little impressive, but not that impressive.

Re:Does this mean

[StevenHenderson]

Too bad it doesn't mean shit if you're still running a GeForce3 :-/

Just goes to show

[Anonymous Coward]

that there is nothing people cannot achieve given enough porn to motivate them. Way to go, I am behind you all the way. I didn't mean it like that so stop that gay fantasy right now!

Re:Just goes to show

[Matthias Wiesmann]

I think you are misunderstood, the goal of CERN is to see the Higgs boson.

Re:Just goes to show

[mod_parent_down]

Funny, I just keep achieving the same thing over and over again...

joke, best I could do on the spur of the moment..

[sgtron]

RMS walks into a bar. Bartender says "Hey, we don't allow hackers in here."

RMS Says "Huh.. that's GNU'S to me."

Interesting point...

[Noryungi]

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.

Re:Interesting point...

[mbbac]

Would a Next Cube be considered a PC? I would, because it's present day brother would be my PowerMac G5. And a Next Cube is the PC that Tim Berners-Lee used when developing the Web.

Re:Interesting point...

[RupW]

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).

Re:Interesting point...

[bobaferret]

Research institutions aren't made of money

but Research is...

Re:Interesting point...

[julesh]

Would a Next Cube be considered a PC? I would, because it's present day brother would be my PowerMac G5.

Just because you're using an operating system that is a close relative in terms of technology used doesn't make the computers the same category.

UNIX was an operating system originally developed for minicomputers. This doesn't mean that my IA32 *BSD machine is a minicomputer -- it _is_ a PC.

Although, that said, I've never used a Next Cube, but I understand they were marketed for single user desktop use, which in my book means they are PCs (or at least, personal computers).

Re:Interesting point...

[hackstraw]

At first I didn't think that you quoted the whole sentence, but you did. It starts with "For example,". It never says that they used a PC. Plus, I don't know of any computer that can survive outside of a server room that money can buy that has peripherals faster than what you can get on a PC. Plus, assuming that the data that was transfered from some kind of storage device (it may very well have been cached into RAM first, or even done in parallel from more than one computer), I don't know of any storage device that can handle anything near 7.5Gbps (7.5*1024/8 = 960 MBs). The fastest storage I know of is fibre channel that can sustain 400 MBs.

This is a pretty impressive feat that is pushing the envelope of all existing computer and networking hardware.

Also, at the end of the article it says:

The technology used in setting this record included 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.

The AMD servers specs can be found here. I don't know if you consider that a "PC" or not. The best offerings in the Itanium department is from HP, and you can look at those guys here. Again, I don't know if you conder those a PC or not, but at least at the lower end of the Itanium family they use the same PCI architecture that PCs use.

Re:Interesting point...

[mbbac]

Although, that said, I've never used a Next Cube, but I understand they were marketed for single user desktop use, which in my book means they are PCs (or at least, personal computers).

Which was my point. I think Tim Berners-Lee was a serious (not computer) scientist and he was using a Next Cube to develop a way of easily retrieving information from his and others' mainframes.

And the OS I use isn't a close relative, it's the latest version of that same OS that was used on the Next.

Re:Interesting point...

[drinkypoo]

In my opinion a NeXT Cube was a workstation and not a PC, at least at the time in which it was rolled out. It was kind of like the business version of a macintosh. However, I've known enough people to use assorted NeXTs on their home desktop to where they might as well be a PC. Hell, back in the bad old days of SLIP lines and 28.8k modems, circus.com's webpage (a geek house I lived in for a while) was hosted from a turbo slab that sat in bedroom of one of the residents. And no, I don't mean the band. That was his desktop system AND the "server" :)

Re:Interesting point...

[PetoskeyGuy]

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?

That's right using Windows Server 2003 64Bit edition. Imagine if this did come to everyone in the US last mile. A spammers wet dream. CPU's would run at 100% just filtering mail from grandma's spam relay.

Re:Does this mean

[OzRoy]

Actually your ping times will not improve. After a certain bandwidth your ping time will be determined by the quality of the network, and how far you are from the server. A standard ADSL connection will provide you with the best ping times already as long as you are not throttling your bandwidth anywhere downloading more porn...

Oh wait... I understand now.

100 Mbps

[bob_avernus]

This makes even the Japanese and Korean connections http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/09/02/132221 5&tid=95/ look pitifully slow. Just what we need the ability to watch 30 high def soaps at once...

Re:100 Mbps

[bob_avernus]

sorry about the link.... was supposed to be http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/09/02/132221 5&tid=95

Err - cancel that

[defsdoor]

Just realised the file was in our proxy cache!!

Re:Err - cancel that

[Cyberdork]

A L1 cache large enough to hold a DVD's worth of data? GIMME THAT NOW!

NOT Speed

[Anonymous Coward]

This is my pet peeve...

This is NOT a measure of SPEED, but of FLOW RATE!!!

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:Achieving equivalent Disk I/O

[Dogers]

Thats what I want to know.. theyre getting DVDs in 4 seconds, where are they putting them? The recycle bin?!

Re:Achieving equivalent Disk I/O

[cpghost]

How fast can /dev/null absorb the incoming data? And what happens when it overflows?

Re:Achieving equivalent Disk I/O

[julesh]

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.

Re:Achieving equivalent Disk I/O

[menkhaura]

Does Windows have /dev/zero or /dev/null?

Zeroes can be quite heavily compressed, this would yield a pretty good transfer rate. TFA doesn't mention whether the data was checked at both ends with, say, MD5sum (it doesn't mean it was not checked).

GMail invitations to the first six dudes who say hello to espinafre at that mail provider.

Re:Achieving equivalent Disk I/O

[burns210]

RAM... lots and lots and LOTS of RAM.

Re:Achieving equivalent Disk I/O

[drinkypoo]

Windows has named pipes. A few of them are very well known. For example, COM1, COM2, PRN, et cetera. A less well-known named pipe is NUL, which is your /dev/null equivalent. There is no /dev/zero equivalent; the OS won't generate nulls for you, you have to generate them yourself (oh the horror.) NUL dates back to DOS, which wanted to be like Unix. Well, a little bit like it. While you clearly can run something like legacy Unix on a 4.77MHz PC, the OS would consume too much of the machine so we ended up with something only a tiny bit like Unix instead.

Re:Achieving equivalent Disk I/O

[julesh]

NUL dates back to DOS, which wanted to be like Unix. Well, a little bit like it.

Little bit of trivia: there was an option in early versions of DOS that could be enabled to require a "\DEV" prefix before device names. It was dropped because nobody ever used it.

See Ralf Brown's interrupt list for documentation on how it worked.

Re:Windoze??

[melkorainur]

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?

Conversion?

[keiferb]

Sure... but what is that in terms of pps (porn per second)?

Re:Conversion?

[PatrickThomson]

More to the point, in the apple specification, this is approximately 200 songs/sec. seems kinda puny, I can't wait for my 1 kilosong fiber!

Re:Conversion?

[ALpaca2500]

yeah, then i download enough music in 10 seconds to fill up my 40 gig ipod...

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:Give me mass storage of that throughput...

[mindaktiviti]

This reminds me of my celeron p2 333. In University my friend would decide to just send me a few movies at a time over icq. Since he was trusted I always put him on auto-accept. Unfortunately I only had a 4.3 GB hard drive back then and lo and behold that kind of transfer speed (on-campus) would bring my computer down to a grinding halt, sometimes crashing it, because the internet connection was just too damn fast. Now it's faster but I couldn't possibly imagine moving 4-6GB in 4 seconds on any hard drive. Which makes me wonder, what were they writing to when they received that data (if they were at all)?

Re:Give me mass storage of that throughput...

[evangellydonut]

use RAID01 or RAID10 with 10,000RPM IDE might help...

Need more info

[tuite]

Are you sure the landspeed record is broken? The SUNET record is over a single IPv4 TCP stream. Is this single stream or multistream, the article doesnt say. Anyways with that performance they probably could break the single stream record also.

Re:Windoze??

[MagicBox]

Maybe this will help

PCWorld

Looks like they were using next-generation Internet Protocol version 6 protocols, but I am not sure if that encapsulates some next generation of TCP/IP as well

Wheelchair

[Himring]

Itanium servers and the 64-bit version of Windows Server 2003

This reminds me of another article this week where a guy strapped jet engines to a wheel chair....

Benefits?

[shadowkoder]

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? :)

Re:Benefits?

[RevKa]

yeah, i agree completely. infact i had a feelings of uselessness, and generally, 'what's the point' while reading the article... meh, managed to get picked up anyways, and to think we could be talking about steve ballmer right now!

Re:Does this mean

[kc0re]

Stay with me. www.porn.com is a huge site to archive.

Re:MOD PARENT SIDEWAYS

[strictfoo]

gotta gmail invite! from a chick! woo!

That's not a chick.

Use *NIX and it would be

[HermanAB]

about 8 minutes.

I guess they wanted to leave themselves some room for improvement and therefore started off with Win2003...

Even faster....Again?!

[lukewarmfusion]

It's starting to sound like a broken record.

Look on the bright side :)

[carlmenezes]

At least we're moving away from the Library Of Congress unit of measurement :)

Not funny

[neilb78]

Can I please have an invite now :-)

neil@DONTSPAMME:1netsolution.com

Re:Station wagon full of backup tapes - Burn them?

[lcsjk]

Well, when I read that I wondered "What does that have to do with anything?" as I thought "About 45 seconds with a little gasoline and a match."---- "But then how do you retrieve the data from the smoke?" "Beam me up Scotty!"

I need more coffee - Lot's more coffee!

Waaaah!

[siskbc]

.... the RIAA and MPAA sue Internet2 as being a potential source for copyright violations by being able to steal a movie in 4 seconds or an album in 0.0003 seconds.

It wasn't my fault I jacked 231232432 movies off P2P! The evil bastards INDUCEd me!!!

Point of life is fun

[dunc78]

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.

Re:Point of life is fun

[freqres]

Friendly fascism, having so much fun, what else do you need?

Re:Point of life is fun

[dunc78]

Is this post suppost to have some kind of meaning? If so, I sure can't decipher it.

Re:Point of life is fun

[freqres]

Here's some keywords to feed into the Google oracle:

Bertram Gross
Consolidated
"Friendly Fascism"

If you need anymore help it means the teevee has already confiscated your powers of free thought.

Re:Point of life is fun

[dunc78]

I give up. You make zero sense. Guess I am without free thought.

Re:What about LOC/s?

[maxwell demon]

Sorry, but Google apparently doesn't know the unit Libraries of Congress per second.

bits or bytes?

[Easy2RememberNick]

'This record speed of 6.63Gbps is equivalent to transferring a full-length DVD movie in four seconds

6.63 Gbps X 4 s = 25,898,437.5 bytes 25MB ?

That's not right is it?
If it were bytes per second then that's way too big...26GB ?

Am I not doing this right? :P

Re:bits or bytes?

[Jokerz17]

6.63 Gbps X 4 s = 25,898,437.5 bytes 25MB ?
That's not right is it?
If it were bytes per second then that's way too big...26GB ?

You are not going this right.
6.63Gbps/8=0.82875GBpsx 4 = 3.315 GB.

So basically you would be transfering a short movie (assuming a long movie at 4.4GB).

Re:bits or bytes?

[Have Blue]

I don't think you're doing it right...

6630000000/8 = 828750000 (828 MBbps)

828750000*4 = 3315000000 = 3.3 gigabytes in 4 seconds.

It may be an exaggeration, but it's not that much of one. Maybe it was a short movie :P

Re:bits or bytes?

[Easy2RememberNick]

OK I see, bits / 8 to get bytes. I should have known that.

It's close enough for me even if it's not 4.7GB. I thought they were exagerating but I guess they know what they're talking about :P

Wow that's fast. (delayed reaction)

Starting Comp Sci on Tuesday...this doesn't bode well for me does it! I'm going to be eaten alive (an old guy in Uni).

What is definition of speed???

[elgatozorbas]

What exactly is the definition of 'speed' here? When I move a DVD from my right hand to my left, one DVD of data has been transfered in less than a second.
I know this is a silly example, but how can you say this is a speed record, when the distance is irrelevant...
Z

Re:What is definition of speed???

[elgatozorbas]

... which doesn't really address the matter, does it? 1TB/s moved over a mile is less impressive than moving 1TB/s to the other side of the world. Both would be a new 'record'...
Z

Those damn humans

[paranode]

If only they would spend less time playing games maybe they could create fast networks for scientific research or something...

Oh wait nevermind that's what TFA is about.

Will be half the speed its supposed to

[jlebrech]

Thats a tremendous speed but when it becomes public and everyone has it, it will be at half that speed with the other half of the packets going to the nsa and every byte we download will be monitored.

I can beat that!

[Mateito]

Look, here I have a 80GB HD full of... um.. arthouse movies. I pick it up, move it a meter. Takes around half a second. Thus I am moving effectively moving data at 1280Gb/sec.

Beats their record.

Oh? It needs to go over wire. Fine.

Be amazed at my 80GB Harddrive over Cat 5 FLYING FOX!!

Bwahahaha.

It's for backbones.

[christophla]

This type of speed is for shared backbones - improving qos for tens of thousands of users at a time. You're not going to get these speeds between two endpoints.

Re:It's for backbones.

[xgamer04]

Think about 20 years into the future, and we might see this kind of speed in our living rooms, especially with super-hi-def video and audio.

Supertanker "error correction" features?

[hellfire]

You bring up a good point. The bandwidth of a station wagon full of DVDs or a supertanker full of whatever is pretty big and while it's slow physically, it might take less time to ship.

However, I've been thinking about this. How long does it take to burn the DVDs? How long does it take to load up? And what about accidents? Cars are notorious for their statistical lack of safety compared to other transportation methods. One small rear end collision is all you need in a station wagon. And the supertanker better be double hulled or we could end up with a new idea for "data flow" as it flows down the coast.

I dunno... just thought I'd do a little exercise :)

anyone remember those 3dfx commercials?

[Trepidity]

3dfx had some commercials a few years ago that had a documentary-style voice talking about how advances in technology could help create a better tomorrow, more efficient farming that would feed the world, and so on, and then some guy says "hey, or we could use it for games!", and then they introduce the voodoo-whatever-number-it-was-at-the-time.

What's a minicomputer?

[tepples]

UNIX was an operating system originally developed for minicomputers. This doesn't mean that my IA32 *BSD machine is a minicomputer -- it _is_ a PC.

Then define minicomputer. Some sources define a minicomputer as any computer with virtual memory and a personal minicomputer as any mini used as a PC. To them, just because you use your personal minicomputer as a workstation doesn't make it any less of a mini.

I've never used a Next Cube, but I understand they were marketed for single user desktop use, which in my book means they are PCs (or at least, personal computers)

If you define "minicomputer" to require multiple users, then what's Windows XP's "fast user switching"? It's multi-user desktop use. And what's "Internet connection sharing" of Windows? It's using your PC as a server.

It's fast, but...

[Spad]

Sure it's fast, but it's not that great. SuperJANET 4 is running on a 10Gbps backbone with plans to increase it to 20Gbps in the near future.

There's nothing quite like having a 2.5Gbps net connection coming straight into your department at uni :)

Internet2 Speed Cop Pulls Them Over

[red floyd]

Ok boys. Did y'know that y'all were doin 6.63Gbps in a 5.5Gbps zone?

I'm afraid I'm goin' t'have t'write y'all up for speedin'.

you IDIOTS!!

[iamhassi]

As if we don't hear enough crap about movie piracy from the MPAA these geniuses come right out and say "Hey great we can now transfer full DVD movies in 4 seconds over the internet!"

Yes I know it's Internet2 and only links universities, industry and goverment for research purposes but still I'm sure the MPAA got their panties in a bunch over that qoute. Couldn't they use the standard measurement for data transfer speeds like how many times it can transfer the entire Library of Congress in a second?

Scalability?

[Thedalek]

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?

Re:How much?

[afidel]

Ah, but you have a flaw in your logic, you have assumed that one picture equals one orgasm. From my "research" that is almost never the case. In fact to get real numbers you would have to do a study to determine the average number of pictures and the average number of short movies it takes for the average consumer to view before achieving orgasm. Then you could calculate the orgasms per byte (and the relative densities thereof) and thus derive your orgasms per second given the network speed. The research is already being carried out all over the internet, we just need some way to record the data and tabulate the results, perhaps there is a use for spyware afterall =)

What about Latency?

[closms]

I agree that bandwidth is great, but applications like distributed file systems are much more sensitive to high latency. Any stats on Internet2 latency?

google to the rescue

[bairy]

*stick repetative porn joke here*
.. then stick something useful underneath it:

(859 gigabytes) / (17 minutes) = 862.368627 MBps

What did they send? How did they send it?

[PetoskeyGuy]

I didn't see any mention of it in the articles. Was this just a unorganized mass of data, or were they actually sending file of some sort?

It's pretty incredible, but does this mean that the filesystem is now the bottleneck? Is this transfer speed at the hardware level, or actual packet data?

Anyone have more details?

In a later interview....

[indros13]

...lead programmer for the experiment, Heinrich Uberfast, was asked the motivation for attempting such a high speed transfer. "Jenna Jameson's new DVD just game out and we wanted to see how fast we could send a copy...er, backup...to our pals at MIT. We wanted to send the whole thing in two seconds, but we would have had to leave out the special features. No way we could do that."

Scientists expect even greater speed will be achieved when CalTech's l33t team gets a hold of the Star Wars Trilogy on DVD.

Re:think of all the pr0n

[istartedi]

What do you think "Various scientific purposes" are?

LoC posts?

[clambake]

Yeah, that SOUNDS fast, but how many slashdot posts asking how many Library of Congresses it is would it transer in that time?

Re:CPU

[julesh]

Not sure about MD5 but SHA1 (which is more complex, even) can be calculated with about 15 CPU cycles per byte on Intel hardware, if you write the implementation using SSE instructions. If your machine were hashing at the most efficient rate possible, it would have taken less than 2 minutes. You have to add to this, of course, disk to memory transfers, cache and pipeline stalls, overhead of switching to any other tasks that needed to run, etc. Chances are the application wasn't smart enough to buffer the data ahead of time to try to keep a full pipeline of data to process, which is the main reason for the slowness here.

Gray area alert

[Whatthehellever]

If the Induce Act were to be made into a law, this test would be illegal, as it has the potential to send copyrighted materials across it.

Come to think of it. it would make tools of all kinds illegal as some idiot would find a way to murder people with them. Also, all automobiles would be illegal as I'm sure someone in this would has already benn run over by one.

Computers would be illegal also. Finally! A legal, government sanctioned way to get rid of Microsoft and SCO!

be nice to run faster...

[evangellydonut]

According to the article, they'll need to xfer 15PB of data in a year...let's see...

6.63Gbps = 0.82875GB/s * 3600s/h * 24 h/d * 365 d/yr / 1024 GB/TB / 1024 TB/PB = 24.9PB/yr

In other words, they'll have to run at ~60% capacity sustained, which is pretty insane...

It wouldn't supprise me if it gets tried

[Sycraft-fu]

At some point. The thing of I2 is it's a member's only club. No external traffic is routed. Well, this means with a little network research, one could write a P2P program that would share ONLY from and to I2 nodes. This would ensure fast transfers... but also make it very hard for the RIAA to monitor. Since the RIAA isn't the kind of group that can get hooked to I2, the nodes wouldn't talk to them. They'd have to get a university to help them.

Interestingly enough

[Sycraft-fu]

Moving harddrives IS the fastest way to send large amount of data for most people. FedEx next day air and even often ground, is just faster than your ent connection can do for large amount of data unless your speed is truly insane.

I mean let's say you need to send 2TB of data to someone. Not as uncommon as you'd think for video work, image research, rendering, etc. So you have a blazing fast line, 100mbit. Unlike the DSL over in Korea that people like to brag about, it's connected to an ISP that has the upstream so you can get that to everywhere. Other side has the same thing as you.

Well, supposing you went full bore using the whole connection and getting 100% efficiece for 24 hours, you'd have transfered only about half your data.

However, if you were to stick the HDs in a box and next-day air them to the site, they'd all get there. Also eliminates the need to maintain a really expensive connection.

Latency?

[buck_wild]

Anybody have latency information?

Sure it's fast, but if ping times are high gaming will suck.

No Longhorn comment?

[michaeldot]

I didn't see the obligatory Longhorn comment, so here it is:

Will this be enough bandwidth to apply Longhorn hotfix updates?

they needed data

[twitter]

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

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.

Perfectly Cromulent

[div_B]

There is nothing wrong with using the word speed, especially when vonerting everything to time.

Agreed, in this context it is a perfectly cromulent word.

if only...

[JudeanPeople'sFront]

Why bother making up a joke, when a quote will do fine. Emphasis is mine:

"Is it possible that building a Unix operating system really only takes a few months --and, oh by the way, you don't even need the source code to do it?" Yes, it is possible, because there are published interface standards. I might have done it myself if it had occurred to me to try -- in fact, I have sometimes wondered why it didn't occur to me.

http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/samizdat-respons e.html

Re:I know the porn jokes are old but....

[mgcarley]

I bet SCO should be sh*tting themselves knowing that almost every linux distribution available at the moment could be sent between CalTech and CERN in 17 minutes!

Ahh! Now they can pirate our copyrighted code faster than before!

Wait a minute... it was a Win2k3 box. Heh. "Windows Server 2003 - now 0wned 600% faster than before."

Heh. You know what would be really funny? If that W2k3 Server had been owned... Then the kiddie (or CalTech student in their dorm room) owning the box could watch the full rate DVD porn stream. Hell, they could stream holographic porn. Or BluRay DVDs.

THAT.... would be pretty cool.