Slashdot Mirror
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.
Canada did it first, And it's country-wide. It can also do speeds as high as 100 Gbit/s but generally operated at 10 Gbit/s.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Basically, they've decided that they need to be prepared for the widespread availability of 8K screens across campuses, and the practicality of 5000 simultaneous 8K streams.
John_Chalisque
It's Sunday night, so let's be picky:
1) 10 or 100 gigabits is not a measure of speed.
2) the "current" internet could very well exhibit the same capabilities if it didn't have to carry all the porn streaming left and right for millions of clients. A conventional network connection rated at xxx could run at that rate if you didn't have any sort of congestion, something this new network will likely not suffer because it doesn't have porn (yet). Any dedicated link will give you that. Heck, any 100Gb/s optical channel will give you 100Gb/s to play with.
3) "designed with hardware security features to protect it from the attacks" from the "internet" - by not having a direct connection to the internet in the first place? Fancy words, but it'll do.
4) $5 million to weave a cluster of fibers? Sounds too cheap.
Finally, the article says that "the new network will also serve as a model for future computer networks", but doesn't say anything about protocols, routing, etc. Nothing.
Sounds a lot like Internet 2
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
In 2006, Internet2 announced a partnership with Level 3 Communications to launch a brand new nationwide network, boosting its capacity from 10 Gbit/s to 100 Gbit/s. In October, 2007, Internet2 officially retired Abilene and now refers to its new, higher capacity network as the Internet2 Network.
Dan
> 100gbps
A hell of a lot more than 8k!
Man, I wonder what kind of porn that will be...[looks up to the stars wistfully, eyes like glazed saucers, the wonder of the infinite]
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Internet 2 was already supposed to be faster than the regular Internet.
This announcement of 10Gbits to 100Gbits is not impressive .. that is a typical server connection these days.
What would be impressive? Multiple terabits or even petabit network, dedicated to the schools, allowing each connected device maximum throughput simutaneously.
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.
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
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.