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The Internet Announcements

Internet2 Speed Record Broken 344

Posted by CowboyNeal from the about-that-time-again dept.
RevKa writes "InternetNews.com has a report of a new Internet2 land-speed record. The old record was nearly cut in half: the two parties, California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), 'transferred 859 gigabytes of data in less than 17 minutes.' InternetNews goes on to say, 'This record speed of 6.63Gbps is equivalent to transferring a full-length DVD movie in four seconds.' Various scientific purposes were mentioned 'as well as commercial applications from entertainment to oil and gas exploration.' The article ended with hardware specs 'S2io's Xframe 10 GbE server adapter, Cisco 7600 Series Routers, Newisys 4300 servers using AMD Opteron processors, Itanium servers and the 64-bit version of Windows Server 2003.'"
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Internet2 Speed Record Broken More

Internet2 Speed Record Broken

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  • wow (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 03, 2004 @08:11AM (#10147846)
    how much bandwidth does doom3 need for network gaming?

    • Re:wow (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Lt Cmdr Tuvok ( 810548 ) on Friday September 03, 2004 @08:42AM (#10148032) Homepage Journal
      how much bandwidth does doom3 need for network gaming?

      It is typical of humans to focus primarily on the ways in which new technology can be utilized for 'fun'. Computer games are a particularily ubiquitous example of this phenomenon. Massively networked computers have the potential to become the greatest compound computational device that mankind has ever had access to. If only the proper effort were expended, multiple paralell processing tasks could quite easily be run on this supernetwork. The combined power of this cluster would thus be beneficial to all.

      There is slim hope that this will happen, at least in the foreseeable future, human logic being as flawed as it indeed is.

      • Re:wow (Score:5, Funny)

        by AviLazar ( 741826 ) on Friday September 03, 2004 @08:48AM (#10148063) Journal
        Dude...your Vulcan speak is freaking me out man... ;)

      • Re:wow (Score:4, Interesting)

        by qray ( 805206 ) on Friday September 03, 2004 @09:27AM (#10148353)
        Definitely beneficial! We could take Tribes 2 or Quake, or the like and build entire simulated armies. Instead of actually killing people we could simulate wars and just abide by the results.

        And you thought computer games were bad. They may save us from extinction.

        • Re:wow (Score:5, Funny)

          by antic ( 29198 ) on Friday September 03, 2004 @10:00AM (#10148638)

          "We could take Tribes 2 or Quake, or the like and build entire simulated armies. Instead of actually killing people we could simulate wars and just abide by the results."

          Great idea, but only if Diebold gets to orchestrate the simulation...

      • Re:wow (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Jameth ( 664111 ) on Friday September 03, 2004 @09:54AM (#10148567)
        "There is slim hope that this will happen, at least in the foreseeable future, human logic being as flawed as it indeed is."

        Ah. So, what will this superior form of logic gain us? With a super-efficient system we could solve all sorts of problems and extend our lives and enrich ourselves, allowing us to have longer to enjoy...wait a minute, you're complaining because we'd rather be able to enjoy ourselves, which appears to be the point anyway, than to not enjoy ourselves for a while so that we can later enjoy ourselves as we would have been doing anyway.

        Perhaps you could explain your 'unflawed logic' sometime?

      • Re:wow (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Illserve ( 56215 ) on Friday September 03, 2004 @09:55AM (#10148578)
        Oh Cmon.

        Giving the average person access to a "compound computational device" would be about the biggest waste of resources in human history.

        • Re:wow (Score:3, Interesting)

          by drinkypoo ( 153816 )

          Parallel computing is the forseeable future of computing. If you have sufficient bandwidth across the internet, it only makes sense to share computing resources between people. Just think about how it could help gentoo users :)

      • Point of life is fun (Score:3, Insightful)

        by dunc78 ( 583090 )
        Seems to me that everything we do in life it to have more fun. Why is technology beneficial to us, because it makes our lives more "fun" or gives us more time to have fun. If it weren't fun why would we want all this technology to extend our boring lives.

      • Re:wow (Score:3, Insightful)

        by cpghost ( 719344 )

        Who said research wasn't supposed to be fun?

      • Re:wow (Score:5, Funny)

        by Not_Wiggins ( 686627 ) on Friday September 03, 2004 @10:15AM (#10148756) Journal

        Welcome to "Skynet." 8)
      • If only they would spend less time playing games maybe they could create fast networks for scientific research or something...

        Oh wait nevermind that's what TFA is about.
      • 3dfx had some commercials a few years ago that had a documentary-style voice talking about how advances in technology could help create a better tomorrow, more efficient farming that would feed the world, and so on, and then some guy says "hey, or we could use it for games!", and then they introduce the voodoo-whatever-number-it-was-at-the-time.

  • Station wagon full of backup tapes (Score:5, Funny)

    by RollingThunder ( 88952 ) on Friday September 03, 2004 @08:11AM (#10147849)
    I think we've well surpassed what a station wagon full of backup tapes can do now....

    • Re:Station wagon full of backup tapes (Score:5, Insightful)

      by IWannaBeAnAC ( 653701 ) on Friday September 03, 2004 @08:18AM (#10147892)
      I don't think so. One DVD in 4 seconds... how many DVD's can you fit in a stationwagon? A few thousand at least (probably 10's of thousands). Each thousand DVD's gives you an hour to drive to the destination to meet the bandwidth requirements.

      Except, that I don't think you can drive from CERN to CalTech, even with a few days to do it ;) So, you might actually be right! But they still have a tremendous way to go to exceed the bandwidth of a supertanker....

    • Ok, now all of you realize that all this speak of transporting DVD copies through interstate highways, as well as through international borders must be breaking a ton of laws here right?
      Now lets quell this speak about illegal actions that are typically in the hands of the EVIL mafia and return to our regularly scheduled programs of "backing up" our DVD movies. :)

    • Hum... Not really "back-up" though. The kind of data which are gonna be produced at CERN in LHC won't be backed up : just too big.

      The point of those super fast transfer rates is that probably experiment data will _not_ be stored at CERN at all, just produced and sent straight to storage farmes. Hopefully organisation will be clean enough to avoid more transfere after first storage. The goal beeing : stored where it's gonna be analysed.

      I worked a while within the ALICE experiment off-line software sectio

    • >>I think we've well surpassed what a station wagon full of backup tapes can do now...

      However, we're still left with the problems of what to do with that station wagon full of DVDs and how to handle the late fees at Blockbuster.
    • We've at least well surpassed what my hard drive can keep up with.
    • Not quite, here's what Andrew S. Tanenbaum writes in "Computer Networks, Fourth Edition":

      [...]A simple calculation will make this point clear. An industry standard Ultrium tape can hold 200 gigabytes. A box of 60 x 60 x 60 cm [approx. 2 x 2 x 2 feet] can hold about 1000 of these tapes, for a total capacity of 200 terabytes, or 1600 terabits (1.6 petabits). A box of tapes can be delivered anywhere in the United States in 24 hours by Federal Express and other companies. The effective bandwidth of this transm

  • This sounds great! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by jkrise ( 535370 ) on Friday September 03, 2004 @08:12AM (#10147853) Journal
    Most desktops don't have that much bandwith on their FSB!!

    • Re:This sounds great! (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Well... Let's see, an LTO-2 drive can spool at 35GBps (that's bytes not bits) a StorageTek L700 can house 20 of them, that's 700GBps (which is approx 5600Gbps) your LTO-2 tape can store 200Gb native, err... I'm getting boared with the maths now, but you get the idea...

      • Re:This sounds great! (Score:3, Interesting)

        by afidel ( 530433 )
        ERROR: Order of magnitude problem
        With a transfer rate of 60 MB/sec, the Ultrium 460 is the ideal choice for enterprise-class data protection needs. linky [hp.com]

        So, real numbers are max 1.2GB/s or 12Gb/s for the L700, not bad, but not that much faster than this transfer. And with the tapes you still have to transport them to the destination to make the comparison fair.

  • DVD speed (Score:5, Funny)

    by Gunzour ( 79584 ) <gunzour@nosPAM.gmail.com> on Friday September 03, 2004 @08:12AM (#10147854) Homepage Journal
    'This record speed of 6.63Gbps is equivalent to transferring a full-length DVD movie in four seconds.'

    Yeah, that's the message we want to convey to the MPAA. Everyone knows the Internet2 is all about pirating DVDs.
    • Who cares what it's good for?

      I want one!

    • Re:DVD speed (Score:4, Funny)

      by jkrise ( 535370 ) on Friday September 03, 2004 @08:17AM (#10147884) Journal
      Think how much faster we can get our Service packs from Microsoft! Download in less than a second - but rebooting would take ages..... groan ;-(

      -
    • Even better, the fact that this is not the first article to refer to network speeds as "DVDs per second/minute/hour" It must piss off the MPAA and RIAA when the media uses DVD/MP3 as a benchmark for network performance.

    • Re:DVD speed (Score:5, Funny)

      by hype7 ( 239530 ) <u3295110.anu@edu@au> on Friday September 03, 2004 @08:36AM (#10147999) Journal
      Yeah, that's the message we want to convey to the MPAA. Everyone knows the Internet2 is all about pirating DVDs.

      Someone give Jack Valenti a call! His exit interview [engadget.com] was linked off here [slashdot.org] just a few days ago, and he said:
      If everything stayed just as it is right now, we could probably survive it, because even with broadband it takes at least an hour to bring down a movie. But I visited the labs at Caltech, and they're running an experiment called FAST where they can bring down a DVD-quality movie in 5 seconds. The director told me it could be operative in the market in 18 months. Well, my face blanched.

      I wanna know what his face does when he finds out we can now do it in under 5 seconds :D It sure couldn't get any uglier than it already is.

      Anyway, don't let him quit before someone tells him!

      -- james
    • DVDs are digital versatile discs. They do have other uses besides movies. I think the measurement was meant to convey how much faster this transmission was than sending the same data backed up to DVDs which is the highest capacity recordable media most familiar to the general public.

    • Re:DVD speed (Score:5, Funny)

      by darc ( 532156 ) on Friday September 03, 2004 @09:10AM (#10148224) Journal
      >'This record speed of 6.63Gbps is equivalent to transferring a full-length DVD movie in four seconds.'

      Sheesh. Whatever happened to the last benchmark unit? Libraries of Congresses? All you kids and your new fangled metric system... DVD units. Back in my day, we were sued by BOOK publishers! Not some crazy eight track industry. Those were some REAL copyrights.

      *prattles*
    • 'This record speed of 6.63Gbps is equivalent to transferring a full-length DVD movie in four seconds.'

      Yeah, that's the message we want to convey to the MPAA. Everyone knows the Internet2 is all about pirating DVDs.

      You're pitching it wrong. What we tell the MPAA is, "See, with Internet2, you can sell a whole movie every 5 seconds."
    • Maybe the good thing is TVoIP.

      Hey, I should trademark that...

      Right now I can't afford both DSL and Cable TV. Which do you think I picked?

      Anything that puts another option out there is good. Now I know that we won't be seeing these speeds to our homes, it just gives me hope. My monitor has excellent resolution and I'm all for streaming television. I'm already sitting here all day - streaming audio gets old.

      If the MPAA was smart, which they usually aren't, they would support this with their minds on movie
    • At least we're moving away from the Library Of Congress unit of measurement :)

  • not bad... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Slashbot Hive-Mind ( 810267 ) <slashbotofborg@hotmail.com> on Friday September 03, 2004 @08:12AM (#10147855) Homepage Journal
    here are some other records (taken from here [internet2.edu]:

    Current Records
    IPv6 Category

    Single Stream Class: 46,156 terabit-meters per second by a team consisting of members from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and CERN across 10,949 kilometers of network.

    Multiple Stream Class: 46,156 terabit-meters per second by a team consisting of members from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and CERN across 10,949 kilometers of network.

    IPv4 Category

    Single Stream Class: 69,073 terabit-meters per second by a team consisting of members from the SUNET, the organization for the national higher research and education network (NREN) of Sweden, and Sprint across 16,343 kilometers of network.

    Multiple Stream Class: 104,528 terabit-meters per second by a team consisting of members from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and CERN by sending 859 gigabytes of data across 15,766 kilometers of network in 1037 seconds (just over 17 minutes), for an average rate of 6.63 gigabits per second.

    • That's interesting, for IPv6 the single and multiple stream records are the same, but for IPv4 the single-stream is considerably slower. I'd very much like to see an explanation of why this is so.

  • In tomorrow's news ... (Score:5, Funny)

    by sawb ( 187496 ) on Friday September 03, 2004 @08:13AM (#10147861)
    .... the RIAA and MPAA sue Internet2 as being a potential source for copyright violations by being able to steal a movie in 4 seconds or an album in 0.0003 seconds.
    • and users of internet2 would be sued for possessing the equivalent of 6.83 billion CD writers!
    • Actually, MPAA/RIAA might just stop messing around and start calculating the BIG damages. Next press release:

      "It has long been established that most blank media is used for piracy. The legislatures have wisely acted to provide compensation to our rights holders for all blank media sold."

      "However, we have been remiss in not realizing that, like blank media, network bandwidth is also mostly used for piracy. Accordingly, we are today introducing a bill to compensate our rights holders for the piracy that

      • "A tax of $0.01/MB will be levied on all network transmissions except those originating directly from our licensed content distributors."

        Of course, if the country has any sort of constitution guaranteeing freedom of speech, copyright law will allow any copyright owner to join the royalty pool. This is already the case with sound recordings and blank Music CD-R media.

    • .... the RIAA and MPAA sue Internet2 as being a potential source for copyright violations by being able to steal a movie in 4 seconds or an album in 0.0003 seconds.

      It wasn't my fault I jacked 231232432 movies off P2P! The evil bastards INDUCEd me!!!

  • Oh-oh. (Score:2, Interesting)

    by King_of_Prussia ( 741355 )
    'This record speed of 6.63Gbps is equivalent to transferring a full-length DVD movie in four seconds.'

    Explaining it like that is likely to draw the wrong sort of attention - How long until Jack Valenti and his crew of RIAA/MPAA thugs descend on this new menace to their livelihoods?

    Incidentally, for some reason gmail has decided to give me 12 invites - they will go to the first 12 logged in posters telling a funny joke involving ESR or RMS, bonus points for use of ASCII.

    • joke, best I could do on the spur of the moment.. (Score:5, Funny)

      by sgtron ( 35704 ) on Friday September 03, 2004 @08:19AM (#10147899)
      RMS walks into a bar. Bartender says "Hey, we don't allow hackers in here."

      RMS Says "Huh.. that's GNU'S to me."


    • Okay, not a joke per se but kind of funny/sad -- RMS objected to the use of 'win' as a prefix to function names in the windows-specific source files in emacs. Seems the connotations of 'win' are too positive to be used in a function name that will only be called on an MS OS.

      I forget whether they were changed, as that was the thing that made me give up on emacs :)

      • Yeah, but did he recommend something ridiculous, like using "tehSuckOS" or perhaps "Micro$loth" as the prefix instead? Can you even use the dollar sign in C/C++ names?

    • Re:Oh-oh. (Score:2, Interesting)

      by meringuoid ( 568297 )
      Incidentally, for some reason gmail has decided to give me 12 invites - they will go to the first 12 logged in posters telling a funny joke involving ESR or RMS, bonus points for use of ASCII.

      I think gmail must have just hit some kind of critical density; I finally got my invite last week, and since then I've been seeing them offered just about everywhere.

      That's exponential growth for you, though... I've invited three people in myself already, and I imagine they've got invites of their own by now. I dou

    • Q: Why couldn't the ESR scientist ever get a date?

      A: Because he was such a Bohr! (explanation) [gsu.edu]

      Oh, you didn't mean Electron Spin Resonance? Sorry.

  • Evil plan (Score:2, Funny)

    by Libor Vanek ( 248963 )
    1, Manage to transfer your data at 6.63Gbps
    2, ???
    3, Profit!
  • [Mark Cuban] believes [slashdot.org] that the solution to movie piracy is bigger file formats.

    Haha. Silly Mark Cuban. Pirates will always prevail in the face of adversity (and high-density media). :)

  • Windows.. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Quixote ( 154172 ) on Friday September 03, 2004 @08:16AM (#10147877) Homepage Journal
    Why don't they do this test with an OS like *BSD (or Linux), with its highly-tuned networking stack?

    • Re:Windows.. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by dk.r*nger ( 460754 ) on Friday September 03, 2004 @08:22AM (#10147916)
      Why don't they do this test with an OS like *BSD (or Linux), with its highly-tuned networking stack?

      Because Microsoft has a marketing budget and Caltech/CERN don't give a rats ass what software it runs when it's the network infrastructure they're showing off..

    • Re:Windows.. (Score:2, Funny)

      by Errtu76 ( 776778 )
      because nobody pirates stuff in linux :P
    • Earlier speed records were set using configurations running
      Debian GNU/Linux [internet2.edu] and
      NetBSD [slashdot.org].

      I guess it primarily depends on what the participating partners are comfortable with.

    • they needed data (Score:3, Insightful)

      by twitter ( 104583 )
      Why don't they do this test with an OS like *BSD (or Linux), with its highly-tuned networking stack?

      They needed data. They started with DVDs they owned, but a few dozen only added up to about 1/8 of what they wanted. Renting was too expensive and they were worn out from ripping the first 12. The solution was obvious ...

      The connected the Winblows 2003 server and used it to collect data. Within minutes, it was rooted and it's reputation for good network connectivity spread quickly. In a day or two, th

  • Distance is as impressive as speed (Score:5, Insightful)

    by erick99 ( 743982 ) <homerun@gmail.com> on Friday September 03, 2004 @08:18AM (#10147894)
    The distance of approximately 9,800 miles is as impressive as the speed. The article did not mention how many devices (i.e. switches, gateways, etc.) that the data passed through from site to site.

    Cheers,

    Erick

  • Interesting point... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Noryungi ( 70322 ) on Friday September 03, 2004 @08:20AM (#10147907) Homepage Journal
    This is straight from the article:

    Internet2 is fast -- Abilene, a U.S. cross-country backbone network, blasts data at 10Gbps. But transoceanic networking is another story. There are hardware and software issues to overcome, Gray said.

    For example, one limiting factor is that the fastest available interface for PCs is the PCIX64 Bus Isolation Extender, which can only handle 7.5Gbps.

    So... Let me get this straight... The problem these guys have is that they are using PC to connect to, and send data on, Internet2?

    I remember a time when "serious" CS researchers would not touch a PC with a ten-feet pole. Times have changed, indeed.

    • Re:Interesting point... (Score:3, Interesting)

      by mbbac ( 568880 )
      Would a Next Cube be considered a PC? I would, because it's present day brother would be my PowerMac G5. And a Next Cube is the PC that Tim Berners-Lee used when developing the Web.
      • Would a Next Cube be considered a PC? I would, because it's present day brother would be my PowerMac G5.

        Just because you're using an operating system that is a close relative in terms of technology used doesn't make the computers the same category.

        UNIX was an operating system originally developed for minicomputers. This doesn't mean that my IA32 *BSD machine is a minicomputer -- it _is_ a PC.

        Although, that said, I've never used a Next Cube, but I understand they were marketed for single user desktop us

        • Although, that said, I've never used a Next Cube, but I understand they were marketed for single user desktop use, which in my book means they are PCs (or at least, personal computers).

          Which was my point. I think Tim Berners-Lee was a serious (not computer) scientist and he was using a Next Cube to develop a way of easily retrieving information from his and others' mainframes.

          And the OS I use isn't a close relative, it's the latest version of that same OS that was used on the Next.

    • Re:Interesting point... (Score:3, Insightful)

      by RupW ( 515653 ) *
      I remember a time when "serious" CS researchers would not touch a PC with a ten-feet pole. Times have changed, indeed.

      Because advancement is market driven and PCs are where the money is. That's probably the fastest price / performance bus they can get. Research institutions aren't made of money (unfortunately).
    • At first I didn't think that you quoted the whole sentence, but you did. It starts with "For example,". It never says that they used a PC. Plus, I don't know of any computer that can survive outside of a server room that money can buy that has peripherals faster than what you can get on a PC. Plus, assuming that the data that was transfered from some kind of storage device (it may very well have been cached into RAM first, or even done in parallel from more than one computer), I don't know of any storag

  • 100 Mbps (Score:2, Informative)

    by bob_avernus ( 799481 )
    This makes even the Japanese and Korean connections http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/09/02/132221 5&tid=95/ [slashdot.org] look pitifully slow. Just what we need the ability to watch 30 high def soaps at once...

  • Err - cancel that (Score:5, Funny)

    by defsdoor ( 737019 ) on Friday September 03, 2004 @08:26AM (#10147941) Homepage Journal
    Just realised the file was in our proxy cache!!

  • Achieving equivalent Disk I/O (Score:4, Insightful)

    by digid ( 259751 ) on Friday September 03, 2004 @08:32AM (#10147970)
    What kind of equipment is needed to achieve the necessary Disk I/O to match the network throughput?

  • Give me mass storage of that throughput... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Vo0k ( 760020 ) on Friday September 03, 2004 @08:40AM (#10148022) Journal
    I'm sick of waiting 2 mins to transfer a DIVX movie to a different partition.
    For us, average nerds, if we ever got connection that fast, it would still feel slow because of our storage speed. :P

  • Wheelchair (Score:5, Funny)

    by Himring ( 646324 ) on Friday September 03, 2004 @08:54AM (#10148110) Homepage Journal
    Itanium servers and the 64-bit version of Windows Server 2003

    This reminds me of another article this week where a guy strapped jet engines to a wheel chair....

  • Benefits? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by shadowkoder ( 707230 ) on Friday September 03, 2004 @08:57AM (#10148133)
    I would like to know the benefits this sort of bandwith testing brings about. Does it help determine bottlenecks in current technologies? Help determine roadmaps for future techs? Or is this just some testosterone releasing between researchers? :)

  • Use *NIX and it would be (Score:3, Funny)

    by HermanAB ( 661181 ) on Friday September 03, 2004 @09:32AM (#10148391)
    about 8 minutes.

    I guess they wanted to leave themselves some room for improvement and therefore started off with Win2003...

  • It's starting to sound like a broken record.

  • 'This record speed of 6.63Gbps is equivalent to transferring a full-length DVD movie in four seconds

    6.63 Gbps X 4 s = 25,898,437.5 bytes 25MB ?

    That's not right is it?
    If it were bytes per second then that's way too big...26GB ?

    Am I not doing this right? :P

  • I can beat that! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Mateito ( 746185 ) on Friday September 03, 2004 @10:48AM (#10149052) Homepage
    Look, here I have a 80GB HD full of... um.. arthouse movies. I pick it up, move it a meter. Takes around half a second. Thus I am moving effectively moving data at 1280Gb/sec.

    Beats their record.

    Oh? It needs to go over wire. Fine.

    Be amazed at my 80GB Harddrive over Cat 5 FLYING FOX!!

    Bwahahaha.

  • It's fast, but... (Score:3, Informative)

    by Spad ( 470073 ) <slashdot.spad@co@uk> on Friday September 03, 2004 @11:07AM (#10149249) Homepage
    Sure it's fast, but it's not that great. SuperJANET 4 [ja.net] is running on a 10Gbps backbone with plans to increase it to 20Gbps in the near future.

    There's nothing quite like having a 2.5Gbps net connection coming straight into your department at uni :)

  • Internet2 Speed Cop Pulls Them Over (Score:3, Funny)

    by red floyd ( 220712 ) on Friday September 03, 2004 @11:22AM (#10149389)
    Ok boys. Did y'know that y'all were doin 6.63Gbps in a 5.5Gbps zone?

    I'm afraid I'm goin' t'have t'write y'all up for speedin'.

  • Scalability? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Thedalek ( 473015 ) on Friday September 03, 2004 @11:47AM (#10149635)
    These Internet speed record experiments are interesting, but the issue of scale is rarely addressed. Okay, so a team of researchers were able to go faster than the speed of bad news, but what happens when the server load is a bit higher than just one transfer?

    Or does Internet2 use some exotic de-centralized transfer method that renders the paradigm of servers laughably obsolete?

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