Errr... the 200-300 metre range only applies to
cards used without an external antenna.
I would imagine this service uses directional
antennas to get the range they need.
BTW, Guys Hospital, one of the locations, is
a 27 storey high tower, easily seen from many parts of SE London.
Does anyone know for sure what technology they are planning yo use?
I was finishing my PhD in HEP.
I remember browsing info.cern.ch with a VT100.
sigh....
And Led Zep wrote the lyrics for today a long time ago: "Ten Years Gone"
> Why didn't they use OC-3c (155Mb) or higher? I'm sure Qwest could find the fiber. Maybe the Cisco gear can't handle it...
Why not indeed? Cisco routers have OC-3 interfaces (unless I'm very, very much mistaken).
> Curently the only method to do that is an ATM OC-48c (2.5Gb). The real-time transfer would be more impressive > because it requires QOS guarantees on bandwidth and delay. There is no way to provide those guarantees with IP, especially over the Internet
Yes! You said the magic word - ATM. You can get the bandwidth and delay guarantees using an ATM link - AND have the IP traffic flowing on the same link too.
Jeezzz... I'm spitting tacks here. IP isn't appropriate for everything. IMHO, its just that Cisco, being a router vendor, have a vested interest in squashing all the good things that an ATM link can do.
Well, you are very, very unlikely to keep your only copy of a digital movie on hard drives (read RAID arrays). They would be archived on tape. Most probably Sony DTFs in the movie industry, as this is a common format.
Well, that's what ATM networking is all about. ATM was born to do this sort of thing - video, audio, IP traffic on the same links. End-to-end quality of service, so you can get a consistent end-to-end reservation of bandwidth for those TIME CRITICAL things like video, and then let the 'store-and-forward' things like email buffer and take a few microseconds longer. So you never would see 'Beffering XX%' in the middle of a movie.
As someone who knows a bit about ATM I'm pissed that Cisco here is steam-rollering the use of IP connections for things like that. After all Cisco do have a vested interest in IP routers...
> I guess I'm being skeptical here, but I won't buy into this whole Crusoe/Transmeta idea until I can sit at my breakfast table reading/. using wireless LAN
Err..... go out to the store and buy an iBook or a Powerbook (your choice) plus an Apple Airport then. Available right off the shelf today.
Top marks at the Expo must go to Maddog. He gave the conference closing speech, and chose to speak about the Expo organisers policy of not allowing young people or students in! He eloquently explained why this was a BAD THING. Best moment of the show for me was at the end of Maddog's speech when we in Lonix marched up to him and invited him to go for beers and a curry later on. The 'suits' just had to stand aside as this "Very Important Person" - Maddog - talked to the troops. Sorry to say it, but I loved the looks on their faces. Jon did come along later to the curry, and I'm sure he enjoyed talking to people. I'm sure he would have enjoyed the Lonix trip to Ivan of the Greater London Linux Uset Group, http://gglug.linux.co.uk also collared him, and he agreed to come to the meet in Docklands on Saturday! Sure enough, he turned up to the meet and had some beers with us in the evening. As I said (many times!) this is like Ronaldo coming out for a Sunday kick-about in the park (soccer reference). But hey - thats' what the revolution is all about. John Hearns
Indeed there is. Check out Sohonet, http://www.sohonet.co.uk
This is a network covering the Soho area of London, which is a centre of movie, TV and media production. You guessed it - they use wireless links to give 155Mbps and 10Mbps links between companies, and a high bandwidth pipe to the Internet. (We happend to be connected by a 10Mbps dedicated fibre link).
Just as you predict - a small, innovative outfit providing high bandwidth services via wireless.
SuperJANET is a 155Mbps ATM network linking colleges and universities in England and Wales.
It links both individual institutions at 34 or 155Mbps and MANs (such as the London MAN etc).
http://www.ja.net
Also, all the universities in Scotland are connected via a 155Mbps ATM network. They use this, and have been using it, for near broadcast quality videoconferencing via ATM codecs (http://www.cellstack.com), just like the goals of this Internet 2 project (Only we're doing it right now in Scotland, but somehow we Scots don't trumpet our achievements to the world).
> How else would you do it though, without every system being directly connected to every other? Each system can > only have direct connections to so many others
ATM networking is the answert to this. Connection-oriented networking - every system does get a (virtual) connection to the others.
And ATM could be used for distributing all those MP3s mentioned below.
>I can't speak for U.K. residents, but I bet it's > the same there. Does anyone think *any* government could really get away with this
Errr... being a UK resident, yes, I think the UK government could implement with this no problemo (technical details/problems aside).
We already have GATSO speed cameras all over the place, not only on motorways but on urban streets too.
Remember also that the UK govt. already tracks suspect terrorost cars via numberplate recognition (there was a recent Slashdot article on this) and this is due to be extended to motorway speed measurements by timing between two fixed points.
One amusing anecdote I heard from a Swede was that the Govt. there put in speed cameras, which the law abiding Swedes accepted without a murmur... Until, strangely, many cameras were 'accidentally' mown down by truck drivers...
> one of the proposals that the lecturer showed us > for a future accelerator would be drilled by robots and would span one or two states
Your teacher was referring to the Superconducting Supercollider, a project which was killed off by the US House of Representatives. It was a big and exciting project at the time, and AFAIK did drive forward developments in magnets. See http://lepton.phys.washington.edu/~atlas/SSC/ssc_d eath.html
(One of the main drawbacks to European particle physicists was that it was located in a dry county. Grin.)
> One big puzzle in astronomy/cosmology is actually why matter exists at all; why is the universe asymmetric,i.e., made up of matter and not antimatter? tough question.
The recent discovery of direct-CP violation helps explain this. It explains why we live in a matter dominated universe (and of course ultimately how we come to be here to discuss it!) See the CERN web pages for some pointers, http://www.cern.ch
One of the fascinating things I got from this article was that the science of high energy physics (my background BTW) was born in cosmic ray experiments on balloons and on high mountain tops. It's great to see that balloon experiments still have something to offer.
HEP/cosmic ray experiments have taken intrepid experimenters (and their computers!) to a lot of strange environments - below ground tunnels, deep salt mines, the South Pole, the deep Pacific waters off Hawaii, mountain observatories, balloons, satellites.
Perhaps it's time for a history of how these demands on computation and data acqusition have helped shaped computing today?
And also re. the thread on antimatter as a propulsion fuel, I do seem to remember some studies on it. There have been a few atoms of anti-hydrogen made at CERN, but to make any significant quantities would be unbelievably expensive and energy intensive.
Well, I gather Gigabit Ethernet will be big at CERN, so they're probably going for that.
But, as Im an ATM person, how about using ATM switches here? I think that would be an exciting project - your point about scalability hits the nail right on the head. 40 Gbs capacity non-blocking ATM switches are here! (ps. that's backplane capacity, not port speed) I also see exciting work in constructing specific protocols over ATM to 'tie together' clusters, rather than relying on simply chucking bandwidth at it a la gig ethernet.
But the real way to connect together high performance computers is GSN, which is being used in high energy physics labs, and other big data centers. http://www.gsn.org 800 MBYTES per second. Mmmm....
As a former high energy physicist, I'd like to comment that, as Fnkmster says, it is possible to produce anitmatter at particle accelerators. This is regularly done at accelerator sites around the world. Research is done with colliding beams of electrons/ant electrons or protons/antiprotons. As I remember, CERN has even produced some atome of anit-hydrogen ( http://www.cern.ch)
It takes a LOT of input electricity (read dedicated high voltage lines, the output of a pwer station, and no running during the winter when France needs the power!) to do this. So I agree that anti-matter won't be an economical fuel in the forseeable future. Then again as a weapon...
However, there is a great deal of interest in muon-catalysed fusion. This was first seen in bubble chamber experiments. Use a particle accelerator to create a muon beam. Target this on a tank of liquid hydrogen. The muons bind much more closely to the hydrogen nucleii and can catalyse fusion reactions between them, by allowing them to get much closer. If it pans out, a new way to get cheap fusion power for the world.
Slashdot Mirror
Errr... the 200-300 metre range only applies to
cards used without an external antenna.
I would imagine this service uses directional
antennas to get the range they need.
BTW, Guys Hospital, one of the locations, is
a 27 storey high tower, easily seen from many parts of SE London.
Does anyone know for sure what technology they are planning yo use?
Yes indeed.
You are referring to Sohonet, which is a MAN
catering to media companies in the Soho area.
It originally started as an ATM network, using fibre connections.
Now uses a mix of fibre connections and 2Mbps Breezecom wireless links over the roofs of Soho and Fitzrovia.
See http://www.sohonet.co.uk
Emmm...
you're looking for real-life benefits from particle physics?
As someone who has worked in both particle physics and medicine I can point out:
*) development of accelerators for cancer radiotherapy, used routinely in hospitals every day
*) advanced dedicated accelerators for novel cancer therapy, like pion therapy and boron neutron capture therapy
*) synchrotron light sources, used for biomedical and semiconductor materials research
*) detectors developed for Positron Emission Tomography scanners
*) development of high field superconducting magnets, as used both in particle detectors and MRI scanners
I think that's a good few examples!
I was finishing my PhD in HEP. I remember browsing info.cern.ch with a VT100. sigh.... And Led Zep wrote the lyrics for today a long time ago: "Ten Years Gone"
> Why didn't they use OC-3c (155Mb) or higher? I'm sure Qwest could find the fiber. Maybe the Cisco gear can't handle it...
Why not indeed? Cisco routers have OC-3 interfaces
(unless I'm very, very much mistaken).
> Curently the only method to do that is an ATM OC-48c (2.5Gb). The real-time transfer would be more impressive
> because it requires QOS guarantees on bandwidth and delay. There is no way to provide those guarantees with IP, especially over the Internet
Yes! You said the magic word - ATM.
You can get the bandwidth and delay guarantees using an ATM link - AND have the IP traffic flowing on the same link too.
Jeezzz... I'm spitting tacks here. IP isn't appropriate for everything. IMHO, its just that Cisco, being a router vendor, have a vested interest in squashing all the good things that an ATM link can do.
John Hearns
Well, you are very, very unlikely to keep your only copy of a digital movie on hard drives (read RAID arrays).
They would be archived on tape.
Most probably Sony DTFs in the movie industry, as this is a common format.
Well, that's what ATM networking is all about.
ATM was born to do this sort of thing - video, audio, IP traffic on the same links.
End-to-end quality of service, so you can get a consistent end-to-end reservation of bandwidth for those TIME CRITICAL things like video, and then let the 'store-and-forward' things like email buffer and take a few microseconds longer.
So you never would see 'Beffering XX%' in the middle of a movie.
As someone who knows a bit about ATM I'm pissed that Cisco here is steam-rollering the use of IP connections for things like that. After all Cisco do have a vested interest in IP routers...
> I guess I'm being skeptical here, but I won't buy into this whole Crusoe/Transmeta idea until I can sit at my breakfast table reading /. using wireless LAN
Err..... go out to the store and buy an iBook or a Powerbook (your choice) plus an Apple Airport then. Available right off the shelf today.
Top marks at the Expo must go to Maddog. He gave the conference closing speech, and chose to speak about the Expo organisers policy of not allowing young people or students in! He eloquently explained why this was a BAD THING. Best moment of the show for me was at the end of Maddog's speech when we in Lonix marched up to him and invited him to go for beers and a curry later on. The 'suits' just had to stand aside as this "Very Important Person" - Maddog - talked to the troops. Sorry to say it, but I loved the looks on their faces. Jon did come along later to the curry, and I'm sure he enjoyed talking to people. I'm sure he would have enjoyed the Lonix trip to Ivan of the Greater London Linux Uset Group, http://gglug.linux.co.uk also collared him, and he agreed to come to the meet in Docklands on Saturday! Sure enough, he turned up to the meet and had some beers with us in the evening. As I said (many times!) this is like Ronaldo coming out for a Sunday kick-about in the park (soccer reference). But hey - thats' what the revolution is all about. John Hearns
Indeed there is.
Check out Sohonet, http://www.sohonet.co.uk
This is a network covering the Soho area of London,
which is a centre of movie, TV and media production. You guessed it - they use wireless links to give 155Mbps and 10Mbps links between companies, and a high bandwidth pipe to the Internet. (We happend to be connected by a 10Mbps
dedicated fibre link).
Just as you predict - a small, innovative outfit providing high bandwidth services via wireless.
John Hearns
SuperJANET is a 155Mbps ATM network linking
colleges and universities in England and Wales.
It links both individual institutions at 34 or
155Mbps and MANs (such as the London MAN etc).
http://www.ja.net
Also, all the universities in Scotland are connected via a 155Mbps ATM network.
They use this, and have been using it, for near
broadcast quality videoconferencing via ATM codecs
(http://www.cellstack.com),
just like the goals of this Internet 2 project
(Only we're doing it right now in Scotland,
but somehow we Scots don't trumpet our achievements to the world).
> How else would you do it though, without every system being directly connected to every other? Each system can
> only have direct connections to so many others
ATM networking is the answert to this.
Connection-oriented networking - every system does
get a (virtual) connection to the others.
And ATM could be used for distributing all those
MP3s mentioned below.
>I can't speak for U.K. residents, but I bet it's > the same there. Does anyone think *any* government could really get away with this
Errr... being a UK resident, yes, I think the
UK government could implement with this no problemo (technical details/problems aside).
We already have GATSO speed cameras all over the place, not only on motorways but on urban streets
too.
Remember also that the UK govt. already tracks
suspect terrorost cars via numberplate recognition
(there was a recent Slashdot article on this)
and this is due to be extended to motorway speed
measurements by timing between two fixed points.
One amusing anecdote I heard from a Swede was that the Govt. there put in speed cameras, which the law abiding Swedes accepted without a murmur...
Until, strangely, many cameras were 'accidentally' mown down by truck drivers...
> one of the proposals that the lecturer showed us > for a future accelerator would be drilled by robots and would span one or two states
d eath.html
Your teacher was referring to the Superconducting Supercollider, a project which was killed off by
the US House of Representatives.
It was a big and exciting project at the time,
and AFAIK did drive forward developments in magnets.
See http://lepton.phys.washington.edu/~atlas/SSC/ssc_
(One of the main drawbacks to European particle
physicists was that it was located in a dry county. Grin.)
The big effort is now going into LHC at CERN
John Hearns
> One big puzzle in astronomy/cosmology is actually why matter exists at all; why is the universe asymmetric,i.e., made up of matter and not antimatter? tough question.
The recent discovery of direct-CP violation helps
explain this. It explains why we live in a matter dominated universe (and of course ultimately how we come to be here to discuss it!)
See the CERN web pages for some pointers,
http://www.cern.ch
One of the fascinating things I got from this article was that the science of high energy physics (my background BTW) was born in cosmic ray experiments on balloons and on high mountain tops.
It's great to see that balloon experiments still have something to offer.
HEP/cosmic ray experiments have taken intrepid experimenters (and their computers!) to a lot of
strange environments - below ground tunnels,
deep salt mines, the South Pole, the deep Pacific waters off Hawaii, mountain observatories, balloons, satellites.
Perhaps it's time for a history of how these demands on computation and data acqusition have helped shaped computing today?
And also re. the thread on antimatter as a propulsion fuel, I do seem to remember some studies on it. There have been a few atoms of anti-hydrogen made at CERN, but to make any significant quantities would be unbelievably expensive and energy intensive.
Well, I gather Gigabit Ethernet will be big
at CERN, so they're probably going for that.
But, as Im an ATM person, how about using ATM
switches here? I think that would be an exciting
project - your point about scalability hits
the nail right on the head.
40 Gbs capacity non-blocking ATM switches are here! (ps. that's backplane capacity, not port speed)
I also see exciting work in constructing specific
protocols over ATM to 'tie together' clusters,
rather than relying on simply chucking bandwidth
at it a la gig ethernet.
But the real way to connect together high performance computers is GSN,
which is being used in high energy physics labs,
and other big data centers.
http://www.gsn.org
800 MBYTES per second. Mmmm....
As a former high energy physicist, I'd like
to comment that, as Fnkmster says, it is possible
to produce anitmatter at particle accelerators.
This is regularly done at accelerator sites around the world. Research is done with colliding beams
of electrons/ant electrons or protons/antiprotons.
As I remember, CERN has even produced some atome
of anit-hydrogen ( http://www.cern.ch)
It takes a LOT of input electricity (read dedicated high voltage lines, the output of a pwer station, and no running during the winter when France needs the power!) to do this. So I agree that anti-matter won't be an economical fuel in the forseeable future. Then again as a weapon...
However, there is a great deal of interest in muon-catalysed fusion. This was first seen in bubble chamber experiments. Use a particle accelerator to create a muon beam. Target this on a tank of liquid hydrogen. The muons bind much more closely to the hydrogen nucleii and can catalyse fusion reactions between them, by allowing them to get much closer.
If it pans out, a new way to get cheap fusion power for the world.