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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."
One Line of Code every 15 minutes? Seems slow to me.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
The speed is 101 Gigabits per second (Gbps), not Gigabytes.
Bring on the Porn comments.
But remember, never underestimate the bandwidth of a 747 full of Blueray disks.
--sig fault--
>. if only my HDD would write that fast!
Has anyone every stopped to think this might be too fast for its own good?
:P
Isn't there a point when we've reached a speed where rather than deciding what to send from one place to another, we become lazy and start sending everything?
And won't that just lead to massive researcher mp3 swaps?
TCP is a specific protocol, a "new" TCP protocol would suggest a different protocol, unless it means a revision of the current protocol.
Best read using Christopher Lloyd's voice from Back to The Future, e.g.:
"101 jigowatts per second!!!" --Professor Emmett Brown
"All great things are simple & expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope." --Churchill
How did they sustain a transfer like that? Unless my math is wrong, that's 11GBps ... what has that kind of read/write speed?
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?
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
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!
They could probably get much better speeds if they compressed it first. The Library of Congress is quite compressible, as there is a lot of redundant data. Text in general is known to be quite compressible.
Here's a question. Sure, you can send 101 Gigabits per second. But what kind of power do you need on either end to send or interpret that much data? I know my hard drive doesn't go that fast. I don't even think my RAM is that fast.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
SCTP was specifically devised as a replacement for TCP as it can emulate the 1 -> 1 connection of TCP but can do connection based 1 -> N too. I thought it has been designed with high speed in mind too. Does anyone know whether this protocol is being used more and more or has it just become another good-idea-at-the-time that got run over by the backwards compatability steamroller?
This is great and all, but has anyone stopped to ask why we need such fast networks? The stock-frenzy driven surplus of unneeded bandwidth was a major contributing factor to the dot-com bust. I remember when I was working on a multi-gigabit, next-generation optical switch, and the project manager was assuring us that in just a few years, people would be downloading their movies from Blockbuster instead of actually traveling there to pick up a DVD. We were all supposed to be videoconferencing left and right by now, with holographic communications just around the corner. A massive growth in online gaming was supposed to cripple the existing legacy networks, forcing providers to upgrade or perish. All of this was supposed to generate a huge demand for bandwidth, which were were poised to deliver.
Well, as we all know, that demand never materialized. We had way more bandwidth than the market needed, and when the bandwidth finally became stressed, providers opted to cap bandwidth and push less-intensive services rather than pay for expensive upgrades to their infrastructures.
I think we should instead be focusing on technologies that can a) generate real new revenue to the providers that we're trying to sell these ultra-fast networks to, b) have obvious and legitimate research or quality of life improvements, and c) are sure-fire hits to attract consumer attention (and $$$).
Don't get me wrong, this is very cool and all, but until Netflix actually lives up to its moniker and sends me my rented movies through my phone/cable line rather than UPS, then it doesn't really matter to me if the network is capable of 5 Gbps or 500 Gbps. Slashdot will still load in a second or 2 either way. We need real products to take advantage of this massive bandwidth, and that revenue will drive research even further, faster. I fear we're going to stall out unless we find a way to embrace these faster networks and make money off of them.
Like woodworking? Build your own picture frames.
Medical imaging produces very large files, and the need to transfer them over distances quickly to save lives is real.
The possibility for video is great as well. Imagine getting multiple feeds of the next WTO event from different sources on the ground. Or quality alternative broadcasting that isn't just some postage-stamp-sized, pixelated blobs. Torrents are nice, but there is something to be said for being jacked in live.
And for those who didn't RTFA, it's 3 DVDs a second.
[insert sig file here]
...how fast this could transfer the sum of all data (DNA, memory, etc.) contained in a human.
Yes, I'm kidding. But only half kidding. In some crazy future where we can reconstitute energy into matter, how much bandwidth would be needed to do this practically? Do we even have any ideas or estimates on how much storage would be needed to accurately represent the nature of the human body in terms of data? And no, I'm not talking about the "memory" of the brain - I'm talking about the physical manifestation of the body itself, of which the memory of the brain is a part.
Canadian researchers at CaNet3 did an interesting experiment around this very question.
What do you do when your network is faster than your drives?
You turn the network itself into a drive - a giant drive made of light and 1,000 miles in diameter.
Basically, the idea is that instead of accessing data relatively slowly from a server's drive, you instead keep the data spinning around the fibre network at the speed of light. If anyone wants something - a DVD quality movie for example - they peel it off as it comes whipping by. I'm not sure what speeds they were working with, but I do recall that a DVD would take less than 1/4 of a second to download. Once you hit these kinds of speeds, everything is always everywhere.
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).
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
I read a lot of : is this needed?, let's be clever and ask oneself what we are doing...
Frankly, it is hilarious from folks who probably jumped on GMail, IPods, stupid phone which does all but work when needed, and other devices which are arguably the most un-needed space on the planet. (No you won't get me to believe your 200MB emails are worth keeping...)
Ciao
As a reminder, the ALICE experiment at CERN will produce per year 1 PB ( Peta Byte ) of _raw_ data. This is only _one_ experiment out of _four_. Add DB overhead and you start getting the picture. And no: there won't be backups: too big. The nature of particle physics is to be statistics. The search is for slight deviations from what is predicted. So the amount of raw data is huge. It is also that the amount of (raw) data per second produced will be in some case magnitude of order bigger.
It is thought that some data will not be stored at all at CERN, but sent straight to remote storage farm. Too much data to be stored localy.
The people analysing those data will be scattered over the planet, involving indeed the need of big transfers.
Ha ha ha: is this needed ? Hi hi let's think about it... Please dump all the crap data you pretend to need and ask again the question.