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Research Scientists To Use Network Much Faster Than Internet
nickweller writes with this story from the Times about the Pacific Research Platform, an ultra-high-speed fiber-optic research infrastructure that will link together dozens of top research institutions. The National Science Foundation has just awarded a five-year $5 million dollar grant for the project. The story reports:The network is meant to keep pace with the vast acceleration of data collection in fields such as physics, astronomy and genetics. It will not be directly connected to the Internet, but will make it possible to move data at speeds of 10 gigabits to 100 gigabits among 10 University of California campuses and 10 other universities and research institutions in several states, tens or hundreds of times faster than is typical now.
Isn't this really just a multi-campus intranet? A research organization needs to deal with data coming in at a rate of Library of Congresses per second (LoC/s) and they simply need to have devoted pipes to handle it. Piping it through the normal campus servers sharing bandwidth with 20,000 students streaming music and porn wasn't working for them.
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Internet isn't a speed, it's a concept. The Internet can have connections at any speed.
At a university I worked at in the past, we had routers that could hand way more than 100G of data ten years ago, and could even put that on a single fiber with a multiplexer. It was off the shield equipment. Projects like this use off the shelf equipment, stuff that is already used in major connections and backbones elsewhere. There is no being greedy and saying others can't play. It wasn't cheap (well, sometimes the routers were free from the vendor since they wanted our help testing out new equipment), but you can see that here that $5M split between 20 end points is not that much money for such a project.