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Researcher Only High Bandwidth Network
Icarus1919 writes "A brand-new 10 gigabit per second per user optical fiber network is now available to researchers in the U.S. (compared to Internet2, which offers only 10 gigabits of bandwidth total, regardless of the number of users). The National Lambda Rail, as it is known, is named for the 40 different wavelengths of light it uses to send data within the fiber network. In the past, researchers have complained about the relatively (relative when you're dealing with terabytes of data) small bandwidth they can access to send data, and the addition of the NLR will most likely be a boon to research."
US scientists enjoy big bandwidth boost
15:21 26 October 04
NewScientist.com news service
The world's biggest fibre optic network entirely dedicated to scientific research is now in place in the US. The National Lambda Rail will allow scientists to exchange more data at faster speeds than via the internet.
"It's a landmark because it's the first time that we in the research community really own and control the underpinning infra-structure vital to advancing science," says Tom West, the CEO of NLR, based in Cypress, California, US. He will outline the benefits of NLR at the Supercomputing Conference 2004 on 6 November in Pittsburgh, US.
The days of "figuring out how to jam a lot of data into a small pipe" are numbered, explains Scott Colburn, a network engineer at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, US, which is part of the NLR consortium - a collection of research institutions and private companies.
"It was kind of like the first computers," he says, "except back then we were trying to work with very little memory. Now we have so much memory we don't give a hoot and in future we won't give a hoot about bandwidth."
Transfer rates
NLR is entirely owned by the US research community and offers users 10 gigabits per second each. In contrast, Internet2 is a slice of internet infrastructure currently designated to the US academic community and provides a total transfer rate of 10 gigabits per second to be shared between all its users.
Both networks use a technique called Wave Division Multiplexing (WDM) to send different wavelengths or "lambdas" of light through an optical fibre simultaneously, with no interference. Light is routed to its destination using prisms which extract particular wavelengths.
Whereas Internet2 dedicates just one lambda to the whole US research community, NLR dedicates 40. Its creators are now distributing cards embedded with lasers of different frequencies to the first four users of NLR, allowing them each to hook into their dedicated channel.
"NLR is another landmark in the progression towards ubiquitous high-speed computing, which is essential for our research," says Julian Bunn, a particle physicist at the California Institute of Technology, US.
Large Hadron Collider
He plans to use NLR - which is connected to existing high speed scientific networks across Europe - to link up with colleagues at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. When the collider goes live in 2007, the network will transfer terabytes of data directly to his lab in California for analysis.
The NLR will also allow US doctors to stream high resolution video of surgical procedures in real time to remote surgeons, allowing them to monitor crucial operations.
And climatologists - who must pool measurements from sources all over the world in real time to make weather predictions - will also benefit.
But NLR is also exciting for researchers who want to experiment with the network itself. Colburn likens it to the pioneer spirit surrounding the earliest version of the internet - ARPAnet - which was purely a research endeavour.
"NLR will provide us with the infra-structure to do things that could potentially bring the network down," he explains. "Commercial internet providers can't allow us to do experiments willy-nilly because the net is mission critical."
These "destabilising" experiments could include trying out new protocols, probing how data should best be routed from one place to another and testing whether decision-making software works better when it is installed on the fringes of the network or at the core.
Researchers have been able to test some of this using a virtual software network called PlanetLab, which sits on top of the internet in a similar way to which the internet sits on top of the telephone network. But this research is subject to internet bandwidth constraints.
"NLR will
In Soviet russia, only old Koreans profit from pictures of Natalie Portman stored on Beowulf Clusters.
Exactly. Every guarantee has an equal and opposite refusal. In this case they have only 40 lambdas, so they can only support 40 users at a time.
They're both 10Gbps, but the difference is that this new one is 10Gbps per *user,* while Internet2 is 10Gbps for *all* users. That's a rather significant difference, I suspect.
Bít, zabít, jen proto, ze su liska!
10Gb/s = 1TB transfered in 800 seconds, or 13 minutes 20 seconds. 10Gb/s per user is far far greater than 10Gb aggrigate.
The Doormat
If you're not outraged, then you're not paying attention.
By "user" they mean "institution connected to our network" not "individual person". As the previous reply said, they're limited to 40 wdm channels, one per user. To put this in perspective (from wikipedia):
Anyone know what the shannon limit for single mode fiber is?
-jim
More information is available at nlr.net including a network map. The first link that went up was between Chicago and the Pittsburgh Supercomputer Center which is run by CMU (where I go). The only problem I think we only have 1 (maybe 2) gigabit links to them, so the bandwidth isn't available onto campus.
You fucking dumbass. Think about it, its a network.
Do you think ONE person is going to be sitting downloading porn or do you think there will be data farms with MANY people accessing them at once.
Errr in case you cant figure it out, it is the latter of the two.
Yes, I will be benefitting from this project. Yes we currently saturate 1Gb like it is a dial up line.
Lets not get into computing power behind the network either. Many Large clusters will be connected to this network.
While some tests have been run with simple off-the-shelf-hardware, in most cases the 10Gbps connections will be shared amongst a cluster of machines or a high-end machine.
For some relevant projects actually using NLR right now:
TeraGrid
OptIPuter
It is not really 10 Gbps per user. New Scientist got that wrong. It's a fiber-optic infrastructure capable with 40 lambdas max. A lambda is a wavelength of light. They use DWDM to split the light on the fiber into 40 lambdas. One lamdda = 10 Gbps.
Now, a single user can, for a period of time, get a whole lambda for himself for a particular application. That's a big deal for researchers. But don't think that everyone at an NLR connected institution automatically has a 10 Gbps link to everyone else on NLR. Most of the users, at best, probably have 1 Gbps ethernet to their desktop. This isn't for browsing the web and playing Doom. It's to connect huge data stores in San Diego to supercomputers in Pittsburgh.
Internet2 is transparent between hosts that are both on Internet2. College students across the country are using I2 for political discussion, gaming, and pr0n right now, and never even knowing it.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
The point of the lambda rail system is not necessarily the bandwidth. Its that there is no "routing" involved on the base network in the traditional sense. High bandwidth combined with low latency is the goal.
--
WHO ATE MY BREAKFAST PANTS?
Last week we celebrated
the 50th anniversary of CERN (European Laboratory for High Energy Physics).
There was an "Open Day" organized (visits to tens of interesting places at CERN) and the Computing Center was one of the most popular places.
I was honoured to be one of the guides there.
The LHC will produce proton-proton collisions 40 million times per second.
Even after a first pre-selection of the events, there will be around 100 "potentially interesting" events per second that have to be recorded for further (so called "off-line") analysis.
There will be 4 detectors running on LHC (ATLAS, CMS,LHCb and ALICE).
The size of the data describing a typical "event" (collision) depends on the detector, but it is of order of Megabytes.
Assuming 1MB/event/detector that gives
1MB*100events/s*4 detectors*86400s/day=
34560000 MBytes of data produced every day.
That is almost 35 Terabytes of data per day (24 hours).
We expect to have some 10 Petabytes of data per year. And we hope to run the LHC for some 20 years.
Obviously, this amount of data cannot be stored/analysed locally; it will be therefore transmitted to scientific institutes worldwide.
You may have a look at the presentation:
[PPT]
PDF
The answer to computing power is the Grid: more information at http://gridcafe.org/
cheers,
Piotr Golonka
CERN IT/CO
I have not enough data to compare the performance of this network with the findings of the Law.
You will be surprised to see that it has a shorter cycle.
Well, there's a useful pamphlet (PDF, 830 kB) on the National LambdaRail website.
It states that there will be a solicitation/application process that will peer review project proposals. The intent is for NLR to be used both as a tool for other research, and also for research into networking technology (both protocols and hardware).
To answer your question, you need to convince their scientists that you have an interesting project proposal, and you probably need to be "affiliated with" a big chunk of grant money.
~Idarubicin