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New Data Transmission Speed Record

An anonymous reader writes "Gizmag is reporting that a team of German and Japanese scientists have collaborated to shatter the world record for data transmission speed. From the article: "By transmitting a data signal at 2.56 terabits per second over a 160-kilometer link (equivalent to 2,560,000,000,000 bits per second or the contents of 60 DVDs) the researchers bettered the old record of 1.28 terabits per second held by a Japanese group. By comparison, the fastest high-speed links currently carry data at a maximum 40 Gbit/s, or around 50 times slower."

41 of 262 comments (clear)

  1. 2.56 Terabits = ? by mattydont · · Score: 4, Funny

    Anti-Slashdoting for a webhost.

    1. Re:2.56 Terabits = ? by bioteq · · Score: 3, Informative

      Not true, actually.

      Most slashdotting happens because of hardware issues, not upstream bandwidth.

      Although, 2tb of bandwidth would be freakin' amazing for some stuff for a botnet to get ahold of..

      Quick! Everyone call up the nearest script kiddie and get to work!

  2. Terabits per second!? by SillySnake · · Score: 4, Funny

    What kind of measurement is that? Why can't we use something everyone understands like u-haul trucks full of dvd's driving 100 kilometers per fortnight*10^(-6)?
    For the uninitiated, that's a microfortnight.

    1. Re:Terabits per second!? by onwardknave · · Score: 5, Funny

      A measurement everyone understands? Like how much porn?

    2. Re:Terabits per second!? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

      Since new porn is being added to the net at more than 3 terabits per second, you could never download it all using this technology.

      Maybe not, but I can damn well try.

    3. Re:Terabits per second!? by Achoi77 · · Score: 2, Informative
      2.328306436539 LOC/s

      From Wikipedia:
      1 LOC = 20 tebibytes
      1 tebibyte = 1,099,511,627,776 bytes

      Doesn't sound nearly as impresive, perhaps marketing should stick with 6,984,919,309 nLoc/hr

    4. Re:Terabits per second!? by gstoddart · · Score: 3, Funny
      A measurement everyone understands? Like how much porn?

      Well, they did say 60 DVDs. So depending on your proclivities, that's ... what ...

      18 hours of phone sex ads + 720 'standard' sex scenes

      180,000 pop shots on compilation

      240 hours of midget porn

      6,000 discrete pee sequences

      No less than 100 gang-bang sequences

      500 bukkakke events

      600 different MILFs

      1 million or so jpeg images

      I mean, these are known measures. ;-)
      --
      Lost at C:>. Found at C.
  3. Re:Digg Loses by imunfair · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Precisely why I read slashdot and fark, but not digg.

    Slashdot has the non-time sensitive, most interesting news - with insightful or interesting comments.

    Fark has the time sensitive or humorous news, with clever or funny comments.

    Digg is somewhere in the middle, with the immature comments or spam I can find in an AIM chat room if I need it.

  4. How much in terms of by anandpur · · Score: 2, Funny
  5. 60 DVDs per second by craXORjack · · Score: 4, Funny
    (equivalent to 2,560,000,000,000 bits per second or the contents of 60 DVDs)

    Wow, converting to MPAA units that's 300 years of jail time per second! Smokin!

    --
    Liberals call everyone Nazis yet they are the closest thing to it.
    1. Re:60 DVDs per second by bedroll · · Score: 4, Funny

      No, no, no... It's $37,500,000 per second. ($125,000 per infringement)

      Remember that the MPAA thinks in dollars.

    2. Re:60 DVDs per second by noidentity · · Score: 3, Funny

      "Wow, converting to MPAA units that's 300 years of jail time per second! Smokin!"

      Hmmm, I sense the possibility of time travel hidden in there somewhere.

  6. Why is bandwidth measured in Kb by b00m3rang · · Score: 3, Interesting

    and storage in KB? It's not like we measure radio waves in cycles per second and sound waves in cycles per 8 seconds. What's the advantage?

    1. Re:Why is bandwidth measured in Kb by blazer1024 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      One reason is because it's serial data generally, and you don't know exactly how many of those bits are going to be data.. (you could have start or stop bits, etc)... but I don't know the details of that, so I'll just mention my other possible reason.

      It's that throughput is generally what actually matters when sending data. In other words, that how much actual payload is being send, minus any overhead. If you've got a decent amount of overhead, your actual throughput might be a bit less. So it makes more sense to talk about bandwidth in bits per second, so as not to confuse it with actual throughput.

    2. Re:Why is bandwidth measured in Kb by EvanED · · Score: 4, Informative

      You think wrong. Some quotes from the Wikipedia entry:

      In recent years, the use of a byte to mean 8 bits is nearly ubiquitous

      Meaning even today it's not universal.

      A contiguous sequence of binary bits in a serial data stream, such as in modem or satellite communications, or from a disk-drive head, which is the smallest meaningful unit of data. These bytes might include start bits, stop bits, or parity bits, and thus could vary from 7 to 12 bits to contain a single 7-bit ASCII code.

      Here I think is the most revealing definition for the discussion in the present context.

      The eight-bit byte is often called an octet in formal contexts such as industry standards, as well as in networking and telecommunication, in order to avoid any confusion about the number of bits involved.

      Another site says that:

      * Pre-1965, and including the IBM 701, bytes were almost always 6 bits, though they weren't called that much then, but rather characters.

      * 9 bits were sometimes used

      * The PDP-6, PDP-10, and DECsystem 20 all supported changing the byte size with instructions from 1 to 36 bits (probably only some of those)

      The latter reference, looking up the PDP-10 on Wikipedia, gives this quote:

      Some aspects of the instruction set are still considered unsurpassed, most notably the "byte" instructions, which operated on arbitrary sized bit-fields (at that time a byte was not necessarily eight bits)

  7. Nothing ever makes it out of the lab by b00m3rang · · Score: 3, Insightful

    into the real world, right? Why are they developing nuclear pebble bed reactors in laboratories, when I can't buy one at the 7-11 yet?

    1. Re:Nothing ever makes it out of the lab by Dhalka226 · · Score: 2, Funny

      "For comparison purposes, that speed would allow a recipient to download an average slashdot user's entire porn collection is just six hours 19 minutes."

  8. And so it begins by Darby · · Score: 3, Funny

    Well folks, time to gear up.

    We know what happens when the Germans and the Japanese collaborate ;-)

    1. Re:And so it begins by gstoddart · · Score: 3, Funny
      Well folks, time to gear up.

      We know what happens when the Germans and the Japanese collaborate ;-)

      Yeah, breaded and deep fried sushi, dark beer in small cups, and Teryaki sausages, LOTS of cabbage, and bubble-tea streusel.

      Oh, the humanity of it all.
      --
      Lost at C:>. Found at C.
    2. Re:And so it begins by swillden · · Score: 2, Insightful

      So technically, it was the Japanese who liberated Europe?

      If you want to look at it that way, it was the Soviets who liberated Europe. Hitler's decision to attack Russia was the beginning of the end for Germany. The Eastern Front diverted and tied down much of Germany's military power, in a conflict that they were almost certain to lose. No one will know for sure, of course, but it's probable that the allies eventually would have liberated Europe even without the direct involvement of the US. The end would not have come as quickly, and the victory would probably not have been so complete, but it's unlikely that Germany would have retained much of the territory it had conquered. More likely, Germany itself, and perhaps much of the rest of Europe, would have fallen under Soviet control.

      So maybe the Japanese liberated the French from the Russians :-)

      --
      Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
  9. Way cool... by threedognit3 · · Score: 2, Funny

    I'm calling my cable company to see if I can pay $25,000/month to get the data rate. Needless to say this will increase the downloads of my extremely intelligent blog.

  10. A 160-kilometer link? by __aawfbm2023 · · Score: 3, Funny

    Equivalent to 160,000 metres and 160,000,000 millimetres!

  11. Basic requirement soon enough. by Funkcikle · · Score: 2, Funny

    Vista will require this much bandwidth as a minimum, to download security patches and have them rendered in erotic 3D by the compulsory 4Tb graphics card, when it is released in THE YEAR 3000.

  12. Re:So, that's OC-What? by heinousjay · · Score: 3, Funny

    Three different answers for what boils down to a grade school story problem. At least we know you three didn't cheat from each other.

    --
    Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
  13. 60 DVD:s per second... by MadTinfoilHatter · · Score: 5, Funny

    ...and in related news, the spokesman for the MPAA is currently unable to comment due to suffering a heart attack.

  14. Re:Digg Wins by adolfojp · · Score: 2, Informative

    Digg is great for learning of new technologies. Slashdot is great because of its discussions. They are complementary websites. I don't see digg replacing slashdot anytime soon, yet, I am glad that digg is there to fill my need of having "as many tech news as possible" available.

    Trying to have good discussions in Digg is futile because of its moderation system. And whenever discussion worthy news are available they are quickly buried by ten articles of what someone somewhere might have said about the color of the new Nintendo console.

    Cheers,
    Adolfo

  15. Re:That's pretty slow by mrchaotica · · Score: 5, Informative

    At 100Km/hour, a truck would require 1.6 hours * 60^2 seconds/hour = 5,760 seconds to travel 160 kilometers. At 60 DVDs/second, the truck would have to be carrying 5760*60 = 345,600 DVDs to have equivalent bandwidth. A typical DVD in a case is 14cm wide, 19cm tall, and 1.5cm thick, for a total volume of 399 cm^3 (lets round to 400cm^3). Therefore, the truck would have to have a cargo volume of 400cm^3 * 345,600 = 138,240,000cm^3, or 138.24m^3.

    Now, typical intermodal containers (as used on big rig trucks) are 8.5' by 8.5' by 40', or 2890ft^3. Converted to metric, this is about 82m^3, which is less than the 138.24m^3 required.

    In other words, no, a truck full of DVDs is NOT faster than this connection!*

    *unless you put the DVDs on spindles instead of in cases.

    --

    "[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz

  16. Single-channel only by Soft · · Score: 2, Informative

    To be sure, I believe this is a single-wavelength transmission record. For WDM (multiwavelength), I believe Alcatel's 2002 record of 10 Tbps over 3 x 100 km still hasn't been topped (Frignac et al, OFC 2002).

  17. Re:faster than ram by Beryllium+Sphere(tm) · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The target use for something like this is Internet backbone traffic, so the question is whether Cisco will be able to deliver a router that will keep the line busy. Cisco's web site says "the innovative 12000 Terabit System scales to 5 Terabits (Tbps) per second ".

  18. Re:That's pretty slow by Beryllium+Sphere(tm) · · Score: 3, Funny

    The 11,520,000 ms ping times also might interfere with some applications.

  19. Re:who cares? by multi+io · · Score: 2, Insightful

    This technology enables many more people to be simultaneously stuck at 4Mbps down/256Kbps up.

  20. Re:That's pretty slow by rjforster · · Score: 2, Funny

    You're assuming only one truck can use the road at a time.

  21. Filesystem and Ultra320 SCSI are our chokepoint by PSaltyDS · · Score: 3, Interesting

    We have a 30TB EMC CX-500 with Brocade 2Gb FC backbone. The bench moves blocks of a few hundred GB to a dozen servers or less. We have never come anywhere near %50 utilization on the FC.

    The transfers run about 4-6hrs and I was looking for choke points to shorten the time. The data simply won't go to disk any faster on the U320 SCSI bus. We consistently measure 20MBps max to disk, which makes sense. U320 means 320Mbps/8 = 20MBps. So I get the same max numbers for local disk-to-disk that I get for SAN-to-disk, and the same results regardless of OS. If this rate could be maintained, six servers doing the transfer should just about saturate the backbone, but the overhead of file access and FS management mean the max is only maintained for a moment as a few particularly large files come across. With lots of smaller files being copied, the average rate goes down to 2MBps.

    If these servers had to be optimized for SAN-to-Disk transfer rate, they would have to have multiple SCSI controllers and HBAs, paired up on seperate PCI busses, and the data would have to be optimized with fewer/larger files.

    Of course, the 2.5TBps link is of interest to ISPs and regional carriers not server labs, but I thought I'd throw in what we've seen on the utilization of a 2Gbps FC link in a SAN setup.

    --
    Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced. - Geek's corollary to Clarke's law
    1. Re:Filesystem and Ultra320 SCSI are our chokepoint by ottffssent · · Score: 2, Informative

      What are you talking about? U/320 SCSI is 320 megabytes per second. Not bits. In a regular PCI slot on an unloaded bus, a U/320 HBA is limited to 90-110MB/sec, but with PCI-X or PCIe that limitation is removed, and single HBAs can readily sustain 500+MB/sec sequential reads from arrays spanning multiple SCSI channels.

      Of course, in many applications, latency of varying sorts quickly chews that number down to something a bit more sane.

      If you're limited to a hard 20MB/sec over SCSI, the first thing I would suggest is to make sure that you're actually operating at U/320 speeds, and your HBA and drive(s) haven't fallen back to one of the SE modes for some reason (faulty connection, crummy cable, missing / buggy / broken / wrong terminator, etc).

  22. Re:That's pretty slow by Kjella · · Score: 3, Funny

    Where's the moderation for "+5 for extreme nerdiness, minus several million because you really should get out more"? /says someone who's closing in on 4000 posts to slashdot...

    --
    Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
  23. Re:in libraries of congress please by DRUNK_BEAR · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Research scientists are always ahead of the "real world". This has always been, always will be. You can view their work as creating ideas, innovations and technologies. Once these ideas have been published, it is the industry's work to pick them up and transform them into something commercially usable. Yes, there is a lot of research projects that can be viewed as useless, but, you should see it as a brainstorming of new technologies. Not all will end up in something revolutionary, but it may incite new ideas and/or bring new products or ways of doing things in the "real world".

    --
    DrkBr
  24. Re:Try 10,000 Kilometers by DRUNK_BEAR · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Optical fiber gives you a loss of approx a quarter dB per km (0.25 dB/km) - which is very close to the theoretical limit of current glass optical fibers. At 160 km, that gives you an attenuation in your optical signal of about 40 dB. All-optical amplifiers - EDFAs - (without signal regeneration, just plain amplification) can give you a good boost in power and you can cascade many before the signal becomes too distorted (because each amplifier amplifies both the noise and the signal). An other type of all-optical amplifier - DRAs - give you a lesser gain, but they do not amplify the noise (pretty cool concept!), so a combination of EDFAs and DRAs can get you an all-optical link - without regenerators - of several thousands of kms! Research scientists do work in a modular fashion. One research group works on one aspect of a problem and other groups work on other aspects. In this case, if one span of optical fiber (without amplifiers) can handle very high bit rates, it is not too difficult to extend this to ultra long haul (UHL) networks which have many spans of optical fibers with all-optical amplifiers - provided that you have amplifiers available for the band of wavelengths that you are using. I am guessing that this is a limitation to this experiment, but a lot of research is done by other groups on all-optical amplifiers working in different wavelength bands. One group cannot do it all, but they rather concentrate on one area and let other groups develop the other areas. So this is indeed a pretty cool and impressive result if we understand the experiment and can see its implication for future optical networks!

    --
    DrkBr
  25. Re:That's pretty slow by Kreigaffe · · Score: 2, Funny

    Well actually, trailers can be up to 53 feet long.. that increases their volume to 109m^3. That's still short, however I believe you're allowed to pull two trailers in any state (and even 3 in some).. 218m^3! Far above and beyond the paltry 138.24m^3 you need. In fact the extra room could carry a WHOLE LOT OF BEER.. for watching all those DVDs.

    --
    ... still waiting for this free-as-in-beer free beer I keep hearing about. :|
  26. Re:revisionist bull. Without US supplies, Russia w by swillden · · Score: 2, Insightful

    You notice that you call my post "revisionist bullshit" and then proceed not to disagree with me.

    Your post primarily says that once the US entered the fray the end was clear, which I completely agree with. What I said was that even if the US had not entered the war, Germany still would have lost (though without US involvement, Japan would probably rule much of Asia). It's interesting that you mention supplies: The US was supplying the allied forces before it actually entered the war, but the US supplies, both before and after 1942 went primarily to the western front. AFAIK, the US never provided significant supplies to the Russians; there really was no way for us to do so.

    I will concede that the US entry into the war and the Normandy invasion did help take the pressure off of the Soviets, but I think it's far from clear that Hitler every could have conquered the Russians. The USSR was too big, too populous and too powerful, even if it didn't have the level of industrialization the US had.

    It's all speculation, but I think even without the US involvement, the Soviets would have fought Hitler to a standstill, consuming more of Germany's troops and resources and the British were already planning the invasion of occupied France even without US troop support (they had US logistical support even without the US entry into the war). The US ended the war much sooner than it would have otherwise, and probably dramatically changed the level of Communist influence in the outcome, but Germany was doomed either way.

    --
    Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
  27. simple math by 3.09+a+hour · · Score: 2, Funny

    lets see, the new record is 60 DVD/s "ordinary" lines come in at 50 times slower, so still well over 1 dvd/second 60/50=x x=ludicrus speed Hey bob, uhh we need to move all of the internet to my house... and back again, by tues.

    --
    Like the saying goes, never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes. -Pyrotic
  28. What kind of DVD ? BluRay ? by javaDragon · · Score: 2, Informative
    2.5 TB, 60 DVD ?
    Let's see...
    # rpncalc
    rpncalc version 1.35. Copyright (c) 1993-2004 David Frey et. al.
    This is free software with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.
    For details, type `warranty'.
    Type `quit' to quit and `?' to get a summary.
    2.5 1024 dup dup * * *
    1: 2684354560
    60 /
    1: 4.474e+07
    1024 dup * /
    1: 42.67
    Well, Unless DVD can contain more that 40 GB of data (BluRay ?), there is a possibility of overflow in submitter's calculations.
    My guess is that it's more like the quivalent of 600 DVD per second which has been transmitted.
    --
    -- javaDragon is an instance of JavaDragon.