Another Internet2 Speed Record Broken

rdwald writes "An international team of scientists led by Caltech have set a new Internet2 speed record of 101 gigabits per second. They even helpfully converted this into one LoC/15 minutes. Lots of technical details in this press release; in addition to the obviously better network infrastructure, new TCP protocols were used."

Comments

one LoC/15 minutes

[SpaceLifeForm]

One Line of Code every 15 minutes? Seems slow to me.

Oye

[NETHED]

Bring on the Porn comments.

But remember, never underestimate the bandwidth of a 747 full of Blueray disks.

Writing speeds

[Norgus]

>. if only my HDD would write that fast!

** Spoiler **

[Stokey]

Cue the gags about "Finally, I shall be able to download my pr0n collection".

Cue questions about whether is gigabytes or gigabits.

Cue questions about "How can I get a such gaping-a$$ bandwidth.

One of these days I will write the ultimate FAQ to /. posts including all the possible combinations of arguments started by SCO stories, how politics is treated here and a whole chapter on non-funny memes.

Go! Pedal faster.

Re:** Spoiler **

[Anonymous Coward]

I for one welcome our new FAQ-writing overlord.

747

[Fullaxx]

or the cost ;)

Best read this way....

[Himring]

Best read using Christopher Lloyd's voice from Back to The Future, e.g.:

"101 jigowatts per second!!!" --Professor Emmett Brown

Re:Gigabits...

[shawn(at)fsu]

Right now the MPAA is trying to figure out how many movies that converts to....

My Car Gets Forty Rod to the Hogsgead

[The-Bus]

Yeah, I'm not really sure what the Library of Congress unit does for me. I'm more used to the European metric measurement of Geburninged Volkswagen.

Nowhere in the article does it say how long they ran the test for. A second? A minute? An hour?

I mean that's a full terabyte almost every minute and a half. What has so much data?

Re:My Car Gets Forty Rod to the Hogsgead

[SlayerofGods]

I mean that's a full terabyte almost every minute and a half. What has so much data?

The library of congress perhaps?

Re:My Car Gets Forty Rod to the Hogsgead

[pjf(at)gna.org]

> What has so much data?

/dev/zero ;P ?

Re:My Car Gets Forty Rod to the Hogsgead

[Binestar]

> What has so much data?

/dev/zero ;P ?

Yeah, but that compresses pretty easy.

Alternative High Bandwidth Solution

[isa-kuruption]

A station wagon hauling backup tapes. Too bad the latency is so high!

I can beat that!

[Anonymous Coward]

I can transfer one and a half terabits from one end of the room to the other in less than a second in two easy steps.

Step 1. Fill 200MB hard drive with data
Step 2. Fling aforementioned hard drive in a frizbee'esque motion across the room.

Expect some data loss however.

Take that Caltech!

Better wait

[koi88]

I dunno, my internet seems still pretty fast.
I guess I skip this internet2 thing and just wait for internet3.

Nah, who needs a station vagon

[Anonymous Coward]

Just get that backup tape from place A to place B,
so that you write to it at place A, then it scrolls to place B, then read it at place B, then gets written to, then scrolls to place A. Of course, that would take some 10-1000 km of tape with some exotic routing, but that would be cool :)

--Coder

Re:Doesn't make sense

[justforaday]

Yes, but if it's using TCP/IP the two Ps cancel each other out, so you'd need to append 'protocol' to that, right?

Or at least that's what I remember from algebra...

Re:They could get better speed

[CProgrammer98]

>>The Library of Congress is quite compressible

I do hope you mean that the data content within the library is compressible... The building itself is quit tough to compress!

Problems inherent in high speed networks

[F4Codec]

A paper I wrote a while ago...

Some Perceived Problems with the Introduction of Terabit Network Technologies.

This short paper attempts to highlight some potential problems associated with the introduction of high speed networking - specifically at the Terabit per second level. These problems are still in the theoretical arena as practical Terabit networks are probably still several weeks away from fabrication.

Introduction.

The primary problem when considering Terabit networks must be the enormous speed that the packets on such networks will be traveling. Naturally there are problems at the protocol level with very large window sizes necessary for useful throughput, and enormous quantities of data "in flight" at any one point. However, these problems are encountered at the Gigabit level and are solvable in principle (by appropriate window and packet size negotiation for instance).

The major problem that is perceived at such high speeds is that data is now flowing at a significant fraction of the speed of light. This brings into play a number of relativistic effects that must be taken into account when designing such high speed networks.

Physical Considerations.

There are firstly a number of physical considerations that must be taken into account. These are problems associated with any body traveling close to the speed of light (c).

1. A large amount of energy is required to accelerate the packets to the required velocity. However, the closer one approaches c - the more of that energy is transformed into mass. Thus packets will become heavier. A related problem is the slowing down of packets, when they enter conventional lower speed Megabit networks. The large amounts of energy that have gone into accelerating the packets and giving them extra mass will be lost. This will require large heat sinks. Cable fractures may also be explosive in these cases (which is in keeping with the abbreviation TNT Terabit Network Technologies). Alternatively, a special large coil of cable could be used to allow the packets to naturally slow down.
2. Networks often need to be laid to fit the physical shapes of buildings and other infrastructure. When any body traveling close to c undergoes acceleration it tends to emit "breaking radiation" or bremsstrahlung. This is particularly noticeable when bodies have to undergo angular acceleration when turning corners. Thus any bends in the cabling will have to be heavily shielded with lead plates to stop the intense burst of high energy particles. At high enough speeds, the curvature of the Earth may also prove a significant loss of energy.
3. Whilst traveling at high speeds, the packets will undergo time-dilation effects. Thus whilst two ends of a connection may agree on a round-trip time for a packet, this may well be different to the packets perceived RTT. The packets estimate of the RTT will be shorter than the measured delay. Therefore if times are kept in the packet this will lead to confusion.
4. When a body is traveling at high speeds, it tends to shrink in the direction of the travel. This means that a packet taking 1400 bytes, might actually take up 1300 bytes space on the network. This leads to more capacity being available than might first be perceived. However all routers must be able to handle packets at speed to stop them suddenly growing. This leads to circuit switching being possibly a better base technology.

A perhaps more serious problem is the case of collisions on a network technology such as ethernet. The collision of two very high speed packets could give rise to many spectacular effects, equivalent to those seen in current particle accelerators. In par

Re:They could get better speed

[Anonymous Coward]

The building itself is easy to compress but unfortunately it's lossy.

Re:Doesn't make sense

[turm]

I've recently heard it referred to as "RAS Syndrome" or, Redundant Acronym Syndrome Syndrome.