Researchers Transmit Optical Data at 16.4 Tbps 2550km

Stony Stevenson writes "The goal of 100 Gbps Ethernet transmission is closer to reality with the announcement Wednesday that Alcatel-Lucent researchers have recorded an optical transmission record along with three photonic integrated circuits. Carried out by researchers in Bell Labs in Villarceaux, France, the successful transmission of 16.4 Tbps of optical data over 2,550 km was assisted by Alcatel's Thales' III-V Lab and Kylia, an optical solution company. The researchers utilized 164 wavelength-division multiplexed channels modulated at 100-Gbps in the effort."

Translation please?

[davidwr (791652)]

What's that in Library-of-Congresses per fortnight?

Re:Translation please?

[CRCulver (715279)]

Is that a laden European or African library of congress?

Re:

[pizzutz (1175903)]

I calculate roughly 248,000 Library of Congresses per fortnight.

Curse my geeky genes for making me calculate that when you asked.

Re:Translation please?

[Eddi3 (1046882)]

(14 * 24 * 60 * 60) / (20 / 2.2) = 123,984 LoCs/fortnight

(total seconds per fortnight)
14 days per fortnight
24 hours per day
60 minutes per hour
60 seconds per minute

all over

(seconds per Library of Congress transferred)
20 terabytes per second (one LoC/second)
2.05 terabytes per second (16.4 terabits per second

Re:Translation please?

[thechao (466986)]

I saw "LoC" and thought "Lines of Code"; my second thought was that you have some *mad* job security.

Re:Translation please?

[u-235-sentinel (594077)]

What's that in Library-of-Congresses per fortnight?

Well... if you are Concast they will give you those numbers in terms of photos or mp3's or emails downloaded in a month.

Personally I like to know in terms of how many 8 track tapes I can download a month. ;-)

Re:

[suso (153703)]

HD DVD, Bluray or regular?

Re:

[thatskinnyguy (1129515)]

Either way, I think my file server needs more space.

Re:

[michrech (468134)]

I prefer HHDD-DDVVDD, thank you.

HD DVD, Bluray or regular?

Re:

[networkBoy (774728)]

Data per boeing 747 (LCF version)

DVDR = 159238213.7 GB/747LCF
HDVD = 677609420 GB/747LCF
BDVD = 847011775 GB/747LCF

-nB

Re:

[fbjon (692006)]

Your calculations are a bit off. The LCF, like the Beluga and similar, is meant to transport aircraft parts which are large, not heavy. Additionally, the bulky airframe means it can actually lift less weight than a regular cargo carrier, and maximum takeoff weight is the limitation for bandwidth, not volume. Besides, the LCF is not for sale to customers.

Redoing for the 747-400ERF:

• Assume each disc weighs 16g, like a CD.
• This gives us a box with a volume of 1,38 m^3 that contains 80000 discs, weighing 128

Re:

[aplusjimages (939458)]

Let's just say it's a lot of pr0n.

Re:

[Eddi3 (1046882)]

Well, I'm not exactly sure what you're asking, but here we go:

(((650 / (0.0014 * .12 * .12)) * 8.54) / 1024) / 1024 = 262.591574 Petabytes

650 cubic meters - rough volume of 747 [1] .0014 meters - rough thickness of DVD .12 meters - diameter of DVD
8.54 GB - dual layer DVD capacity
1024 GB in 1 TB
1024 TB in 1 PB

So, a 747 can carry about 250 Petabytes of data in Dual Layer DVDs at a time. Then just divide that by the time it takes to fly it wherever you want it.

[1]: All volume values for the 747 were found at h [zap16.com]

So, this speed, on a scale of 1-10...

[r_jensen11 (598210)]

Would this qualify as 11?

Re:

[suggsjc (726146)]

For now...wait a couple of years and it will be a measly 5-6. Not sure what we are going to do with all of that bandwidth, but I'm sure that we'll come up with something interesting and possibly even useful.

ObWalken

[Saint Aardvark (159009)]

<walken>That's a lot of cows. [imdb.com]</walken>

Don't get too excited.

[geminidomino (614729)]

That's just BURST throughput. Depending on factors like time of day, how many other users there are, and environmental conditions, throughput may drop as low as 33kbps. And we do NOT filter bittorrent.

Just check your TOS agreement. It's all right there.

Re:Don't get too excited.

[holyspidoo (1195369)]

Now offering the fastest 16.4 Tbps service* available anywhere

*1 Gig upload/download monthly limits apply

On Neutrality

[by Anonymous Coward]

In other news: American telcos wonder how French providers are able to afford research and development without additional funding from a tiered billing billing scheme that is needed to advance the science in the United States.

Re:

[mrvan (973822)]

Never applied for EU research funding, did you? :-)

Current cables?

[headkase (533448)]

With the ever-predicted bandwidth crunch always just around the corner, can existing cables be reused just by replacing the signaling equipment at substations with this? If we don't have to lay all new cables - just upgrade the nodes - then upgrading to these bandwidth capacities on our current networks would be a cinch.

Re:

[afidel (530433)]

The problem has never been the glass! There is absolute craploads of dark fiber just about everywhere. Last time I saw stats it was something like less than 1/3rd of installed fiber was lit up. It's the uber expensive routing equipment needed to keep up with the flood of data that's the expensive part.

maybe its just me

[the_mind_ (157933)]

"164 wavelength-division multiplexed channels modulated at..."

how very Star Trek of them.

Re:maybe its just me

[pizzutz (1175903)]

"164 wavelength-division multiplexed channels modulated at..."
how very Star Trek of them.

I'm sorry Captain, but we canno' reach these speeds with time-division multiplexing. the phase coils canno' handle it!

16.4 Tbps of optical data?

[Gabest (852807)]

Tbps speed, and over 100 Gbps. Something is wrong here.

Re:16.4 Tbps of optical data?

[spectrokid (660550)]

They had 164 lasers with different colours sending 100 Gbps EACH over the same fiber, splitting the colours apart again at the other end with what probably is a little more advanced than a prism.

Re:

[EricR86 (1144023)]

I'd wadger they're using devices like a Diffraction Grating [wikipedia.org] or a Fabry-Perot Etalon [wikipedia.org]

Only a little more complicated than a prism :)

Re:16.4 Tbps of optical data?

[colinmcnamara (1152427)]

Its called dense wave division multiplexing, or DWDM. You take independent links (in this case 100Gig links), and transmit each of them on a slightly different wavelength of light called a Lambda. Since optic is looking for a specific wavelength, you can now run many "virtual links" per physical fibre. This is the standard technology for most Telcos. The innovation here is that they are doing this with 100Gig transceivers, and they have chipsets fast enough to combine the different lambda's back together into on high speed link. And yes, you can now let the Lambda Lambda Lambda jokes fly

Re:

[HTH NE1 (675604)]

Not all the pr0n, just the really fast pr0n.

Measuring data quantity by its speed over a distance in kilometers? What's next, measuring its speed by its acceleration over a volume in Liters?

Doesn't matter...

[ScaryMonkey (886119)]

No matter how much speed they create, they will still be subject to the Law of Diminishing Porn Returns, which states:

For download rate n, my demand for new porn will require me to download at a rate of n+1.

Sending "optical data"

[Splab (574204)]

Where I the only one thinking a truck filled with DVD's when the headline said optical data?

Re:Sending "optical data"

[thwack328 (1057700)]

Senator Stevens? Is that you?

!Ethernet

[Lars Clausen (1208)]

Part of the Ethernet spec [wikipedia.org] is to wait 9.6 microseconds after the medium appears to be idle before sending, then resend if it collides. Light moves about 3 kilometres in that time. Making an Ethernet of 2550 km pratically guarantees nothing but collisions. So while this is a hunkin' heap of net, it's not Ethernet.

Re:

[dave420 (699308)]

Surely if an ISP adopted this, they'd have people signing up left right and centre. Wouldn't it be awfully attractive to their target audience?

Re:

[darthflo (1095225)]

Unfortunately both target audiences (that's 1. Supercomputing/clustering big/experimental stuff and 2. being a Tier 1 backbone provider) for this kind of technology don't need their ISP to provide it. Your average SoHo couldn't even deliberately use a single Gigabit link; even well-connected datacentres don't (yet) need 100 Gbps outside connectivity.

Re:

[afidel (530433)]

If you really need greater than 10Gbps then go with Infiniband as you can get 12x HCA's that will do 24GBps (48Gbps full duplex). But if you're paying $50 for 10Gbps ethernet you're not getting offloading and your CPU's are probably swamped of your TCP/IP stack is the problem. I would suggest getting a pair of offloading 10Gbps cards and seeing if you don't see a huge improvement.

Re:

[Doc Ruby (173196)]

Well, it turned out that 10Gbps interfaces actually cost more than $50, probably more like $500 per port. But they don't require recoding apps to use the Infiniband fabric.

The point is really that there's a huge jump from a $15 1Gb-e (or $500 10Gb-e), if that jump can be made at all, while there's no 100Gb-e at any price. And instead of rolling out 100Gb-e that works for LANs, the industry is evidently waiting until it's good for continent-spanning WANs.

Re:

[afidel (530433)]

You keep talking about recoding apps, YOU DON'T NEED TO. There is a standard for IP over Infiniband. It's not as performant as native Infiniband protocols but it DOES exist and is in use. Besides without a dedicated specialized processor and gobs of buffer memory your typical server isn't going to be able to keep up with 10Gbps Ethernet let alone anything faster.

Re:Make it Short and Fast and Snappy

[leomaro (1221010)]

There is another problem, and is actually the bottleneck of transmitting packets at high rates.

It doesn't really matters (yet, and considering Ethernet technology) if the BW of the fiber is a zillion Petabits/sec.
The problem is now at 1Gbps and 10Gbps in Ethernet technology, and is because the processor overloads with the amount of hardware interrupts. The processors that are general purpose have to waste too many clock cycles processing that much interrupts, the processors nowadays are superscalar [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superscalar [wikipedia.org] ]and every time the processor have to change the context (to attend an interrupt) has to do lots of things like unloading the registers, saving the context, loading the registers of the new process, and has to drop something out of the pipeline [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pipeline_(computing) [wikipedia.org] ] loosing performance.

Ethernet tech has a huge latency [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latency_(engineering) [wikipedia.org] ] and a stack that makes processing not so easy (if you look at te code of a linux network device driver it handles pretty much everything including writing the mac address that is only copied when the driver initialize).

That is why there are some relative new things (NAPI in Linux) that try to make lessen the overload, there are new network devices that handle layer 2 and 3 (or at least parts of those, for example, is used to be handled the checksum algorithm) to avoid doing it in the processor. There are some white papers (one from intel, another from NetXen, I'm sorry I don't have the links now) that explain the problem and some approach to a possible solution.

Yes, I know, there is something I have not said, and is that the main switches or routers have to deal with that and have hardware specially designed to do heavy network packet processing, and that is the point, the network cards will have to do that (and are already starting to), neither is an easy job for hardware designers, nor for the market, is easier and cheaper to have a machine that you can change the behaviour only changing the firmware or changing settings from a program (routers have an operating system, and lots of those are a general purpose microprocessor with a linux kernel and a web server to configure it, for example home routers).

There is much to say yet in this field.

Re:

[Detritus (11846)]

Interrupt loads can be greatly reduced by switching to a polling-driven architecture. See FreeBSD.

Re:

[leomaro (1221010)]

>Interrupt loads can be greatly reduced by switching to a polling-driven architecture. See FreeBSD.

New API (NAPI) takes a mixed approach, read: [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_API [wikipedia.org] ], and for more information: [ http://www.linux-foundation.org/en/Net:NAPI [linux-foundation.org] ].

Re:

[Moskit (32486)]

"Everyone" is waiting for either 40Gbit/s or 100Gbit/s Ethernet.
The first one is what server-people push (they claim they do not need more, that's why 40Gbit/s was put into Ethernet standard),
while network people want full 100 Gbit/s.

> But what about all the LAN vendors, which have a real market for 100Gbps

They don't.
There seems to be market either for 40Gbit/s in LAN/local connections or for 100Gbit/s for core/long haul. At least judging but what happened with high-speed ethernet standard.

Re:

[Gaima (174551)]

This is the reason 100gpbs isn't being considered for lan use. It just isn't feasible at this point.

Stick a thousand machines on each end, and you'll understand why 100Gbps is needed.

Re:

[Doc Ruby (173196)]

I'm running Linux on a Playstation3 with SPU video drivers in its Cell uP that can run at over 150GFLOPS. Since the PS3 has only 512MB RAM, it needs to be fed by the LAN and just buffer the LAN in its RAM. Even if SATA drives are delivering only 1.2Gbps, there's no reason I can't have multiple parallel drives on independent servers (if a single server's IO isn't fast enough for multiple SATA at full bore) on my SAN delivering multiple streams through my switch all to my Playstation. Now, the PS3's 1Gb-e is

Re:

[Doc Ruby (173196)]

I had found with Froogle a Sun 10G-e card (probably refurbished) for $35, but it's not available now on searching again. It does seem that 10G-e cards do cost something around $500 at least, and plenty up around $900+.

But the point is that I can't buy anything faster for even 10x or 100x, except multiple cards. And maybe some really exotic interconnect that's not ethernet, so apps have to be recoded to use it.

Re:

[afidel (530433)]

You're apps don't talk to Ethernet, they talk to your TCP/IP stack! There is an IP over Infiniband standard which is supported by most HCA's and it's even fully offloaded to the HCA processor. IPoIB isn't as efficient or low latency as native Infiniband protocols but at least you don't have to recode your apps =)

And the reason there isn't anything faster is that it's such an incredibly niche market, the number of sites that need greater than 1GB/s on a single link are very, very small. Heck the storage for

Re:

[Doc Ruby (173196)]

True, but the rest of the sentence said:

Since there's no other local interconnect faster than 10Gbps-e, I'd even settle for 100Gbps-e across 1m, for interconnecting in my rack without changing my software that all depends on ethernet between hosts.

Infiniband isn't ethernet.

Re:

[Doc Ruby (173196)]

How can it be a few years until "any breakthrough" in >10Gbps when we're discussing successful tests of 100Gbps across 2550Km already? Sounds like the breakthroughs have already arrived, but telcos are aiming for a totally different market than LANs. If it's working even most of the time at 2550Km, then it should be pretty close to commercial availability at 10m or 100m.

Re:

[DarkSarin (651985)]

really, because I'm out in doylestown, and I have it. 5/5. and I'm very happy.

of course I forgot to pay my bill for a couple months, so they aren't happy with me...but it is still working, so whatever.

Re:

[Detritus (11846)]

DWDM [wikipedia.org]