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Internet2 Turns 10 and Upgrades
An anonymous reader writes "As an update to a previous story, Internet2 is celebrating its 10th anniversary in Chicago this week at it's fall conference. In addition, they're announcing the initial stages of their second significant network upgrade of their backbone network. Engineers are providing daily blog updates on the network install process as the old network is transitioned to the new. In addition to changing to a Level3-managed and Internet2-provisioned DWDM transport system for backbone capacity, I2 is implementing a new connection-oriented backbone network based on the Ciena CoreDirector platform in concert with the routed IP network."
Not much. I'm at an I2 site and when I do big downloads from other I2 sites, they're noticably faster than from places like Redhat, Novell, etc. Sure, there's some technology in I2 that allows for more reliably low latency connections but you'd be hard pressed to find a web based application that would need that tech that I1 doesn't already serve (provided you're willing to spend the money for your last mile connection of course).
Only 27 years difference. 'Internet1' is 37 years old now.
This is the successor to Abilene.
l ides2_files/frame.htm
http://www.internet2.edu/network/
or, more specifically:
http://www.internet2.edu/network/library/Networks
I2 from a connectivity standpoint really isn't anything different from I1. It's still an IP routed network and all your normal IP routed toys (www, ftp, home brew app) still work as advertised. The term Abilene is actually the name of the I2 backbone network. It was spawned as a second generation IP network (and yes it can route IPV6 natively) to connect research institutions. Allowing them to utilize the network for research and high speed data transfers. What kind of research? Well anything really, hear about those doctors doing remote robotic surgery? That data probably was traversing the Abilene backbone. Grid computing in acedemia? Probably connected via Abilene .
:).
Just like the I1 backbone, Abilene, being a backbone network, peers and eventually splits off to regional controlled networks. The one I am familiar with is OARNet (Ohio Acedemic Research Network). OARNet provides high speed connectivity to Ohio campuses and peers with the Abilene I2 backbone in Indianapolis (from OARNet's POP in Cleveland).
From an I2 connected campus (meaning you have access to the Abilene backbone at somepoint), there really isn't anything special to connect over the Abilene core. The network gurus had the IPV4 routing setup in such a way that if you connected to an IP address that was available via Abilene, the data would go that path. Otherwise, it would route out over the standard I1 connection. Most of the time when I would have to download some big ISO images, I would specifically look for an Abilene (I2) connected peer. Downloads over 10MBit weren't uncommon (mostly limited by the load on at the server on the other end). Pretty cool really. I'm sure others around are using it for more important stuff other than downloading ISOs
"From a user's perspective, what does Internet2 (or Abilene) "look" like?
As a person who's been on internet2 for 6-7 years now (and currently posting from a machine on Internet2) we get great stuff like I2hub to share huge files really fast and fantastic speeds( practically no lag) on online games with other I2 users on a private server on I2.
After that, day to day browsing is the same since the sites are almost always hosted on the slow internet.
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
The Internet2 is the research network that universities use for high-bandwidth needs. Universities formed a consortium so there would be a fancy organization that NSF would fund network connections and that they could leverage their size to get cheaper bandwidth.
Buying a 10Gbps line from I2 that travels over Level3's network is about 10x cheaper than buying that bandwidth through L3 directly. Of course, it can be damned expensive to buy up the fiber from your university to one of the I2 hubs. Further, I2 doesn't like you to connect directly to their hubs - they prefer to connect through a "regional network". So, the Great Plains region, for example, set up a regional network called the GPN, and then the GPN buys the connection to Abilene (the name of the current I2 network).
There's some money available for research into networking technologies such as the connection-oriented software mentioned above, but most of the traffic is simple IPV4 (and some IPV6).
So, for some people, the I2 means that they can turn over 200 TB of disk cache every 2 weeks or so (which are the requirements for some sites associated with the Large Hadron Collider, like us). For others, it means that they can stream classes in HDTV across the United States.
For another good chunk of users, it means that they can trade movies/songs at gigabit speeds, if the p2p application can support that. Most can't. It still takes a bit of networking black-magic to get line-speed for gigabit ports, but not nearly as much as it used to.
Internet 2 is but a couple of years younger than its older sibling
Oh god, when will people (even on Slashdot!) realize that Internet != the Web? It's just plain aweful to see apparently computer-savvy people like you making the confusion. Oh well, not quite as bad as my sister who calls "Google" both Firefox and the Web.
The Internet is a network, the Web is a service that happens to use this network.
.
You just got troll'd!
I think it would be better viewed as "another Internet". Unless I misunderstand it, the Internet and Internet2 aren't connected at high levels, they only get connected in some sense because of "customers" like the one mentioned above that have a network that will route some of its traffic to Internet2 and some of it to the Internet. Think of it like having cable TV from two different companies, and having a switch that controls which one you're watching at any given time. The two cable companies aren't really connected per se, it's just your machine that can access either stream. Since internet is two-way, I assume someone with connections to both could of course run some kind of server to provide Internet2 access to the Internet or vice versa, but that's not like the two of them being networked together at many points, it's just some dude purchasing access to both and saying "hey, I'm going to connect these".