Terabit Routers

Rocket Boy writes "I was perusing the news and came across this sucker. The specs on the thing look outrageous. Heck, the whole thing looks outrageous. 2.5-5.6TB/S speed, Supports 2240 OC-48 or 560 OC-192 connections. " You can download a lot of po.. I mean play a lotta qua... I mean read a lot of slas... I mean.. work. You could do a lot of work with that.

Comments

Not really

[Anonymous Coward]

Great, bring up the chicken or the egg whydontcha.
Don't forget you've got 100's/1000's/etc... of people on the end of a line using that bandwidth, not just one squeezing at it.

Take the /. effect. I highly doubt that most /.'ers are on a dedicated T1 to the net but on a 28.8k+ to WaveModem & we still manage to bring down servers that are on dedicated T1/3's, etc...

If they terebyte xfer ability was there we'd upgrade dontcha think? Mbit ability has been available on the net for years & we're finally catching up to it. (2400, then 14400 (no one used 9600) then 28.8, 33.6, ISDN/ADSL or 56k OR WaveModem, and we're still not as fast as what the hubs & routers are talking to each other at AND we still think its slow.

We have the reverse situation at my company. We have 10/100's in everyone's PC but the routers & hubs are only 10's. What a pain! There's only 250 PC's systems to connect...they should get with it.

Anyway, up here in Canada Shaw has been VERY ambitious about wiring us up with the Wave & the ISP's are advertising *DSL lines. I don't know of an area in Calgary that doesn't have the wave. Maybe you need to move?

--Clay

Re:*DROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOL*

[jd]

How to build yourself a high-speed mobile network, in three easy steps:
Step 1. Inflate two quantum-scale wormholes, by rotating a mass at relativistic velocities.
Step 2. Thread your high-speed optic fibre link through the wormholes. A few cm's should be enough.
Step 3. Plug the optic fibre into your high-speed router, at either end.

Re:So pointless...

[cpt kangarooski]

Uh... I had thought that the interstate highway system was created during the Eisenhower presidency. It's a military road system, although used much more heavily by the civilian populace (built by state/local governments with federal funding)

The purpose for the system, of course, is to be able to move troops and war material across the country fast. The state of the nation's highways prior to the interstate system was awful (MA residents - remember how Rte. 9 was once the Mass. Pike? Like that)

This is a _lot_ like the Internet, which began as a military project but is pretty damn useful in the civilian world.

BTW - Although the Hoover Dam was built in the depression, I don't think that it actually was one of FDR's make-work projects. FDR was trying to revitalize the economy after the Great Depression, and died in '44 as World War II began to wrap up. Truman was president until '53, and he had to deal with switching over from a war economy to the post war economy. Busy work was not a part of that really; retooling for civilian goods was. He did have a lot of work anyhow - the unions kept giving him fits.

Frequencies

[sallgeud]

So anyway.... The only difference between OC-3 and OC-192 is the number of seperate light frequencies that are sent across the line. Fact is that most fiberoptics can handle a considerably larger number of light frequencies than is currently being done. The only problem is developing a switch/hub/router which can decypher all of these seperate frequencies. It's not all that hard, but it's damned expensive. There's no point in teaming together 2000 OC-192's when you can just create better technology which will be just as fast... and probably end up costing less, and be a bit more reliable. I can't image how much CPU time it would take to route 2000 different connections... that's mad.

Moore's Law

[Rayban]

Looks like the Dense Wave Division Multiplexing technology is going to take over in a few years. I bet you'll see this technology appearing in digital cellphone networks, followed shortly by inclusion into the Internet backbones.

A couple of these routers stationed across the world should handle an enormous amount of bandwidth.

If you take a look at the whitepaper, you'll see that they're partnered with Nortel-- one of the leading telecommunications companies.

What an amazing product.

Not the only one

[mssymrvn]

If you are looking for some other bad boys there are plenty of other startups that are doing the same thing. As I recall, Nexabit plans on having a set of boxes that you can link together and route up to 64 OC-192c streams. It might be more. Check these places out:

http://www.nexabit.com/
http://www.argon.com/
http://www.ironbridgenetworks.com/

I'm sure there are others I'm missing.




nick

Re:I'll believe it when they build one

[kfiles]

This box is not revolutionary. Current switch fabrics already are set to do OC192, and vendors are shipping boxes with 10-12 slots. Avici is just building a full-height-rack monster with 40 slots. Notice that to get the full speed they state, you have to install a bestiary of 14 full racks. All slots, and the switch fabric per-port speed will still be OC192. Their claim to be able to extend the switch fabric to inter-node connections is dubious. There is no way off-bus memory accesses will happen without significant latency.

As for their hype about Packet-Over-Wavelength, any box that can do OC192 *does* this, as OC192 is the input to a DWDM Transponder.

Not news

[apilosov]

Pluris was doing it (or claimed to) since '97. They used hypercube for internal switching fabric configuration, and I believe used wireless very-short-distance (1m) links to reduce amount of wiring. Vadim Antonov was the brains behind it, he left the company in '98. Pluris didn't release anything, and their website (www.pluris.com) seems down. Vadim also is person who named major russian UUCP host as 'kremvax', developed/ported unix for soviet PDP-11 clone (called DEMOS), founded first russian ISP (also called DEMOS), architected much of SprintLink, etc.

Avici on other hand doesn't really say much about how their fabric is done, but I imagine it won't be crossconnect (2000x2000 wires...ugh). Probably some sort of hypercube or selective mesh. I wish Avici was as forthcoming with technical details as Pluris. :)

I'll believe it when they build one

[Salamander]

Saying something is "scalable to X terabits" doesn't mean much unless you specify what an "X-terabit router" really has to do. A big $#@! pile of PCs is "scalable to X terabits" if they're all handling totally independent traffic flows and never have to talk to one another, for example. Probably the most useful measure is "cross-sectional bandwidth" (i.e. the amount of bandwidth you'd have to remove to partition the nodes into two or more isolated subsets) as used for measuring intramachine interconnects, but - alas - Avici doesn't give us that information.

There's also this little issue of balance. Nothing scales perfectly, and often you don't know where the bottleneck will be until you build one. Sure, if you add up all the links maybe you get up to X terabits, but maybe node-internal contention for some resource limits you to X/100. Of course, this never stopped marketing types from acting as though their machine/link/router would be the first in the history of computing to scale perfectly.