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Bandwidth Challenge Results

the 1st sandman writes "SC2005 published some results of several challenges including bandwidth utilization. The winner (a Caltech led team of several institutes) was measured at 130 Gbps. On their site you can find some more information on their measurements and the equipment they used. They claimed they had a throughput of several DVD movies per second. How is that for video on demand!"

3 of 111 comments (clear)

  1. Re:LOC'ed in. by phatslug · · Score: 4, Informative

    130 Gbps = 0.0158691406 terabytes per second (using google)
    1 Library of congress is 20TB
    1 Fortnight is 1209600s
    0.0158691406 x 1209600 = 19195.31247
    At 130Gbps after 1 fortnight 19195.31247TB would be transfered
    19195.31247/20 = 959.77 Libraries of Congress per fortnight.

  2. What does each component do? by FunFactor100 · · Score: 2, Informative

    It would be nice to know what each group of hardware is doing in this setup. What purpose do all the different servers have on the system? Also, there is a lot of storage on this setup, however it's spread all over the place. They have 4x300GB hard drives in each of the 30 Dual Opterons, one 36.4GB hard drive in each of the 40 HP servers, 24 hard drives on the Sun server, more hard drives on the IBMS, and even more on the Nexsan SATABeast. Any idea what each cluster of servers does?

  3. Re:Probably not enough DVDs/sec by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    You retards.

    You don't have them download the entire fucking DVD in one second or in one hour. Who, other then nerds, wants to fill up their harddrives with movies that they can simply watch at any time over the internet with a small subscription base.

    You stream it to them.

    On a DVD movie the HIGHEST bitrate your going to see is around 10Mbps.

    If you had a 130Gbps pipe... that would allow you to serve 13 thousand customers on one connection, and that is at the highest quality setting aviable on dvd movies nowadays. More likely your dealing with movie data between 4 and 8 Mbps and if you take into account that people aren't going to be watching all at the same time you can probably comfortably service around 40 thousand people.

    If you use mpeg4 compression on it and get 'TV' quality formats you could probably serve closer to 100 thousand people movie content with no hickups no matter how many people wanted to watch a movie.

    Then if you take into account that you can use multicast, like have a delay of up to 5 minutes for play time to sync up customer requests to make multicasting more effective, technology to stream the same data stream to multiple people.

    At each fork in the network the router would repeat the same output on both ports, etc etc until all the customers receive their own stream then your dealing with the ability to litterally take care of MILLIONS of people over a 130Gbps link.

    People have been doing multicasting for a while now.

    If you want to have people download rather then subscription service then stuff like Bittorrent will accomplish the same thing.

    The way to get rid of the threat of piracy then is not to do DRM then.. it's to bundle subscription services at the ISP level.

    If you had a deal with a ISP for a high speed internet link and you could watch any movie you liked as much as you liked for only a extra 7-10 dollars, or maybe limit you to a dozen movies for 5 bucks a month would you take it? I know I would. It would eliminate any desire to pirate for all but the most retarded/depraved people.. which the companies wouldn't make any money off of anyways.