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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."
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.
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.