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Researchers Break Internet Speed Records

Posted by Zonk on from the hey-you-yeah-you-using-firefox-pull-over dept.

MosiMosi wrote to let us know about a new development on the Internet2 front. Researchers in Tokyo have advanced the speed of the network, breaking records twice in two days back in December of last year. "On Dec. 30 [researchers] sent data at 7.67 gigabits per second, using standard communications protocols. The next day, using modified protocols, the team broke the record again by sending data over the same 20,000-mile path at 9.08 Gbps. That likely represents the current network's final record because rules require a 10 percent improvement for recognition, a percentage that would bring the next record right at the Internet2's current theoretical limit of 10 Gbps."

37 of 140 comments (clear)

  1. Why is the theoretical limit 10 Gbps? by msauve · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Don't they have redundant paths? Can't they use ECMP? (I'm assuming that the "limit" is referring to 10 Gbps max link speed)

    --
    "National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
    1. Re:Why is the theoretical limit 10 Gbps? by Anon-Admin · · Score: 5, Funny

      I am sorry, the budget was cut and we had to eliminate the redundant paths. It was too costly and as such we expect you figure out how to get the full 10Gbps out of the single T1 line. Please have the proposal ready by tomorrow, and remember that any solution you come up with should cost no more than your time. Oh, and we are a Windows only shop so you can not suggest OSS solutions.

      Thank you,
          Your Management.

  2. But... by i.r.id10t · · Score: 5, Funny

    But can they beat a station wagon full of backup tapes (or DVDs or whatever) yet?

    --
    Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
    1. Re:But... by Rude+Turnip · · Score: 2, Funny

      Clearly, they must have used very sturdy tubes for this project. Therefore, you could take those same tubes and create tunnels to cross the oceans, which would allow a station wagon full of DVDs to drive around the world. Therefore, it will *always* be impossible to beat the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes or DVDs, because the station wagon will just rise with the tide.

      --
      Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
    2. Re:But... by ect5150 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Across a 20,000-mile path, I'm starting to bet on the network.

      --
      I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.
    3. Re:But... by presarioD · · Score: 5, Interesting

      But can they beat a station wagon full of backup tapes (or DVDs or whatever) yet?

      Hmmm, let's see: Let's have maximum capacity DVD's at 9GB and for the sake of this exercise let's say the station wagon's capacity is 1000 DVDs so we have 9000GB moving around. Let's say the 20,000 mile distance will be covered at top speed (breaking speed limits in all states) at 100miles/h that results in 200 hours of deliverance time so:

      station wagon data speed = 9000 GB / 200 hours = 45 GB / hour = 0.0125 GB / sec = 0.1 Gbit / sec

      Nope the Japanese win!

      --
      Yam, yam, uga booga, yam, yam, yade, yade, uga booga, yam, yam, yade, yade
    4. Re:But... by Waffle+Iron · · Score: 2, Informative

      Let's see... A DVD has 3.76e10 bits. If you drove 20,000 miles at 70mph, that would take 1.03e6 seconds. So each DVD in the wagon would give you about 37Kb/s bandwidth. So you'd need about 248,000 DVDs in the car. My little postal scale here says that a DVD in a paper sleeve weighs in at 20g, so you'd need almost 5000kg of DVDs, which is probably too much for a station wagon. You could probably manage the task with BluRay or HD-DVD, though.

    5. Re:But... by drinkypoo · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Is there some more mass-efficient storage medium?)

      My guess for the best today is MicroSD. It would be horrendously expensive, but you can get 2GB MicroSD cards. You'd have to amass a lot of MicroSD cards to have the same mass as a CD and it takes only five of them to out-store a dual layer DVD.

      It would take some 25 of them to equal a Blu-Ray disc. Not sure which would win that competition.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    6. Re:But... by maynard · · Score: 2, Funny

      That's just the fake wood paneling causing too much air friction. Rip that stuff out and you'll get 0.10000100 Gbps, no prob.

    7. Re:But... by Obyron · · Score: 5, Funny

      Au contraire!

      Your capacity estimate is way, way too low. My DVD test samples can get 15 discs in a space 1"x5"x5" (e.g., 25in^3). There are 1728in^3 in a cubic foot, which translates to about 69 such stacks, for a total of 1035 discs per cubic foot. With its rear seat folded down the 2008 Volkswagen Jetta SportsWagen has 66.9ft^3 of storage space (source). We'll call it 67ft^3 for the sake of the math, and assume that you've crammed a few discs in the glovebox. This brings us to a total of 69,345 discs in our datawagon. If we use dual layer blu-ray discs at 50gb/disc that comes to 3.07 petabytes (x10^15). I'll use your 200 hour delivery time, which means we have an overall speed of 269.09GB/s (3467250000000000 bytes / 12000 seconds). You can keep your internet2, although I -will- cede that it gets better gas mileage.

      I would like to posit a new theorum: Advances in storage space and vehicle capacity will always increase such that a sufficiently well-fueled station wagon will have faster throughput than the latest advances in network architecture.

      --
      --Obyron
    8. Re:But... by maxume · · Score: 2, Informative

      If you are going to use throughput it probably gets a bit scary; raw bandwidth, sure, but I can click send faster than you can burn your blu-ray discs. Your throughput is limited to some multiple of the fastest burner money can buy. If you magic 10x blu-ray burners into existence, you would only need a dozen or so to keep up with the network(of course, you have to go way, way faster than the network because you have all that dead time while you bring the discs over to your readers at the other end of the transmission). And they did it with a good installed circuit, which may or may not represent the latest advances in network architecture.

      Here's a good theorem though: People care a lot more about latency than bandwidth.

      --
      Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
    9. Re:But... by SETIGuy · · Score: 3, Informative

      Hmmm, let's see: Let's have maximum capacity DVD's at 9GB and for the sake of this exercise let's say the station wagon's capacity is 1000 DVDs so we have 9000GB moving around. Let's say the 20,000 mile distance will be covered at top speed (breaking speed limits in all states) at 100miles/h that results in 200 hours of deliverance time so:

      station wagon data speed = 9000 GB / 200 hours = 45 GB / hour = 0.0125 GB / sec = 0.1 Gbit / sec

      You are mixing up latency with bandwidth. The latency (round trip time) of the connection here is 400 hours. The bandwidth (i.e. data rate) is the amount of data divided by the time it takes for the data to travel its own length.

      At 100 mph, a station wagon will travel its length in 0.14 seconds. So the bandwidth of a stationwagon packed with 9000 GB of data is about 550 Tbps.

      Given a train of station wagons running at 100mph, you could sustain that. Of course with 1440000000 ms ping times, I wouldn't try playing Battlefield 2 over that connection.

      Seriously, the distinction is important. If you included transit time when calculating bandwidth, the theoretical maximum bandwidth for a 12,000 bit packet on a 20,000 mile path would be 112 kbps.

      --
      Support SETI@home
  3. almost but not quite by treeves · · Score: 2, Informative

    9.08 * 1.1 = 9.988

    --
    ...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
  4. and so when your staff sends you an e-Mail... by Glowing+Fish · · Score: 5, Funny

    So with this newer, faster internet, when your staff sends you an e-Mail at 10 AM Friday, you don't have to wait over the weekend to get it?

    --
    Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
    1. Re:and so when your staff sends you an e-Mail... by 0racle · · Score: 3, Funny

      Depends on if it gets to take the first class or economy class tubes.

      --
      "I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
    2. Re:and so when your staff sends you an e-Mail... by zCyl · · Score: 4, Funny

      when your staff sends you an e-Mail at 10 AM Friday

      Your staff doesn't send email. They send internets.
  5. Improvement by pizzach · · Score: 3, Funny

    On Dec. 30 [researchers] sent data at 7.67 gigabits per second, using standard communications protocols Yes, the internet seems to be getting faster bit by bit.

    Ha ha ha *snort* I beat myself up.
    --
    Once you start despising the jerks, you become one.
  6. tubes? by TinBromide · · Score: 3, Funny

    Maybe if they moved from a series of tubes to parallel tubes, they'd get a higher current flow...

    --
    Is it sad that I am more likely to recognize you and your posts by your sig than your name or UID?
  7. We need a real alternative to the internet. by zymano · · Score: 3, Interesting

    A backbone not owned by the phone companies would reduce prices. An alternative that that doesn't rely on the robberbaron phone and cable companies for the last mile(wimax?).

    Something that allows for video like Iptv would be big.

    It would be more disruptive than the current net because then you could attend classes from home.

    This would be great for the economy too.

  8. Obligatory Simpsons quote by smooth+wombat · · Score: 5, Funny

    Marge: "Does anyone need that much porn?"

    Homer (drooling): "One million times faster...."

    --
    We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
  9. Gee I'm impressed... by spydum · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I'd be more impressed if they DIDN'T modify the TCP stack, and used the PUBLIC Internet. Internet2 is far from a real production network. I'm sure if I ran 40,000 miles of fiber and interconnected two idle routers and modified my TCP stack to handle massive window sizes and other tweaks, I could get nearly the full line rate, at twice the distance.

    1. Re:Gee I'm impressed... by powerpants · · Score: 3, Funny

      I'm sure if I ran 40,000 miles of fiber and interconnected two idle routers and modified my TCP stack to handle massive window sizes and other tweaks, I could get nearly the full line rate, at twice the distance. And if you had, we'd be talking about it.
  10. This just in.. by Rob+T+Firefly · · Score: 5, Funny

    Internet2 has just gone even faster, breaking the speed of light.

    An email has just been sent to a researcher on ARPANET in 1972, who unfortunately doesn't know what "v1@gr@" is or why he would want to "enlarge pens" with it.

    --
    Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
  11. High quality movies! by smitty97 · · Score: 5, Funny
    from TFA:

    With the 10-fold increase, a high-quality version of the movie "The Matrix" could be sent in a few seconds rather than half a minute...
    Efforts to make a high quality version of "The Matrix Revolutions" have not succeeded in any time frame.
    --
    mod me funny
  12. New Speed Record? by Anon-Admin · · Score: 2

    There 9.06Gbps is a speed record???

    Ummm, OC-192 is 9.6Gbps I think they are a little shy of the speed record. Maybe I missed something.

    1. Re:New Speed Record? by tomstdenis · · Score: 4, Informative

      As I understand it, this is over one link. OC-192 is actually a series of OC-48 links bonded together.

      Heck you can get yourself a nice 10gbit/sec line with 10 1gbit lines, ooh la lah

      Tom

      --
      Someday, I'll have a real sig.
    2. Re:New Speed Record? by ziegast · · Score: 2, Informative

      Ummm, OC-192 is 9.6Gbps I think they are a little shy of the speed record. Maybe I missed something.

      Within a data center or a metro area, it's commercially viable to pump tens of gigabits per second of bits from point A to point B using many parallel fiber circuits between the two locations. What makes the Internet2 land speed record (http://www.internet2.edu/lsr/) interesting is adding distance to the problem by multiplying the speed times the distance. The unit of measurement they use is "terabit-meters per second" (Tbmps?). The current record is 272,400 Tbmps, or ~9Gbps over 30000km (1km=1000000m). The transfer rate is really a function of 1) latency adjustments in the data transfer protocol, 2) the minimum transfer speed capable between all points on the network (currently OC192=10Gbps), and 3) the speed of the sending and receiving computers. While OC192 might theoretically be 9.6Gbps, getting the various vendors
        switches on different continents to all send packets at line speed for a long period of time with minimal packet overhead can be challenging.

      What makes this pointless, though, is that the sending and receiving equipment is in the same location. In their documentation they send the bits from a computer in Tokyo through Chicago through Amsterdam and back through Seattle to the same lab in Tokyo. It would be much easier to put a 10GigE fiber between the two machines, but that's not he "point" of the exercise.

      Someone has to pay for this. Usually its the country's taxpayers or a company's stockholders.

      I'd much rather see benchmarks for transferring N terabytes of real data from one site with lots of disks to another far-away site with lots of disks. Real companies can use that data for pontificating disaster recovery and content/database replication technologies. I'd reckon that Google can beat the multiple stream Internet2 LSR any day they want by pumping petabytes of data between its data centers over multiple 10GigE backbones. Andy Tanenbaum's (or Hal Stern's?) station wagon full of tapes is also a fine competitor.

      -ez

  13. Never underestimate... by Daath · · Score: 5, Funny

    *Never* underestimate an Airbus A380-800F. It will carry a 150 tonne payload at 0.85 mach, 6500 miles before refueling. A Hitachi 7K1000 1TB drive weighs in at 700 g. That's around 210,000 TB. Flight at .85 mach will take about 30 hours, let's give them 10 hours for refuelling and maintenance. That's 40 hours. If I'm not mistaken, that's around 60 GB per second. What's that? Around half a TBps?

    Beat THAT Internet2!

    Feel free to correct my "calculations", as they weren't any such thing! :)

    --
    Any technology distinguishable from magic, is insufficiently advanced.
    1. Re:Never underestimate... by woodhouse · · Score: 4, Funny

      Not bad, but I'm not sure I'd want to play CS with that kind of ping.

    2. Re:Never underestimate... by Nullav · · Score: 3, Informative

      I think I'd get bored waiting around...

      You look at a progress bar for entertainment?
      On a more serious note, you'd still get in one chunk, so the initial byte wouldn't matter.

      What we need to look at is Gigabits per dollar.
      Assuming that you were somehow blessed with an ISP that would let you download over a TB/month, and had a 5Mb/s connection (and assuming constant speed), it would take roughly 19.4 days to download.
      Assuming a 30-day month and that your ISP charged $40/month, it would come to $25.86 for that one transfer, which would be $0.000003/Mb.
      Shipping a 700g package to (anywhere in) Canada via USPS airmail (The Internet is international, after all.) would be $14.50. That comes to $0.000001/MB.

      Just my 0.0002 cents.
      --
      I just read Slashdot for the articles.
    3. Re:Never underestimate... by TimToady · · Score: 2, Funny

      That's nothin'. Never underestimate the bandwidth of an Airbus full of station wagons...

  14. Assume 60 mph by benhocking · · Score: 2, Funny

    If we assume 60mph average speed for that trip, than a 20,000 mile trip will take 333 hours and 20 minutes or 1,200,000. At 9 GB/s, the network will have transferred 10,800 TB in that amount of time. Assuming dual-layer blu-ray DVDs, each with 50 GB (0.05 TB) of data, the station wagon will have to carry more than 216,000 DVDs for it to win. If each DVD takes up about 3.6 cubic inches (0.1x6x6) or 0.002 cubic feet, the station wagon will need to carry 432 cubic feet of DVDs.

    I think the network wins this one.

    --
    Ben Hocking
    Need a professional organizer?
  15. Airbus wins by benhocking · · Score: 4, Insightful

    But the calculations do need correction. :) 210,000 TB in 40 hours = 1,458 GB/s or 1.458 TB/s.

    --
    Ben Hocking
    Need a professional organizer?
    1. Re:Airbus wins by Hossicle · · Score: 2, Funny

      During a recent attempt I got at least a transfer rate 2.1 TB/s through a common phone line.

      Unfortunately the data was just a big string of Zeros...

      Does that count? Great compression rate too!

  16. size of a byte, and storage capacity of the net by rmelton · · Score: 3, Interesting

    With simple assumptions and google calculator

    c / 9.08e9 bits per second =
        the speed of light / (9.08e9 (bits per second)) = 0.264134324 m / Byte

    20000 miles / (c / 9.08e9 bits per second) =
      (20 000 miles) / (c / (9.08e9 (bits per second))) = 116.212843 megabytes

    So bytes are 26 centimeters long, and the network holds 116MB in transit.

  17. Re:Confusing bandwidth with latency... by alienmole · · Score: 2, Funny

    The bandwidth is the amount of time it takes the data to travel its own length.
    Wow, that makes it all so simple, thanks! Now I just have to measure how long this file I have is. I guess I have to print it out and use a ruler, but what font size should I use? This network design stuff is tricky!
  18. 100 Gigabit already achieved! by Adeptus_Luminati · · Score: 2, Informative

    Why is this "10G" even news? 10 Gigabit (OC192) Has been around since at least 1999. In fact, engineers & scientists already have functioning proto-types of 100 Gigabit over fiber (basically DWDM - multiple colours of 10 Gigabit streams multiplexed).

    The IEEE expects the standard to be ratified in mid 2008 for the fiber version & copper (CAT8?) to come out within a couple of years after that (late 2009 or 2010).

    Siemens achieves 111 Gigabits over 2,400 kilometers
    http://presszoom.com/story_127837.html

    Bell & Lucent labs acheive 107 Gigabits over 2,000 kilometers
    http://www.enterprisenetworksandservers.com/monthl y/art.php?2642

    Wikipedia:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/100_gigabit_Ethernet

    Those Internet2 people are just a tad behind... like 10 fold! If Internet2 = 10G, and Internet3 =100G, then really those Internet2 people should be working on Internet4 (Terabit baby!)!

    Adeptus

    --
    No trees were killed in the making of this post; however, many trillions of electrons were horribly inconvenienced.