New Data Transmission Speed Record 262
An anonymous reader writes "Gizmag is reporting that a team of German and Japanese scientists have collaborated to shatter the world record for data transmission speed. From the article: "By transmitting a data signal at 2.56 terabits per second over a 160-kilometer link (equivalent to 2,560,000,000,000 bits per second or the contents of 60 DVDs) the researchers bettered the old record of 1.28 terabits per second held by a Japanese group. By comparison, the fastest high-speed links currently carry data at a maximum 40 Gbit/s, or around 50 times slower."
Re:2.56 Terabits = ? (Score:3, Informative)
Most slashdotting happens because of hardware issues, not upstream bandwidth.
Although, 2tb of bandwidth would be freakin' amazing for some stuff for a botnet to get ahold of..
Quick! Everyone call up the nearest script kiddie and get to work!
Re:Why is bandwidth measured in Kb (Score:5, Informative)
In recent years, the use of a byte to mean 8 bits is nearly ubiquitous
Meaning even today it's not universal.
A contiguous sequence of binary bits in a serial data stream, such as in modem or satellite communications, or from a disk-drive head, which is the smallest meaningful unit of data. These bytes might include start bits, stop bits, or parity bits, and thus could vary from 7 to 12 bits to contain a single 7-bit ASCII code.
Here I think is the most revealing definition for the discussion in the present context.
The eight-bit byte is often called an octet in formal contexts such as industry standards, as well as in networking and telecommunication, in order to avoid any confusion about the number of bits involved.
Another site [uiowa.edu] says that:
* Pre-1965, and including the IBM 701, bytes were almost always 6 bits, though they weren't called that much then, but rather characters.
* 9 bits were sometimes used
* The PDP-6, PDP-10, and DECsystem 20 all supported changing the byte size with instructions from 1 to 36 bits (probably only some of those)
The latter reference, looking up the PDP-10 on Wikipedia, gives this quote:
Some aspects of the instruction set are still considered unsurpassed, most notably the "byte" instructions, which operated on arbitrary sized bit-fields (at that time a byte was not necessarily eight bits)
Re:Digg Wins (Score:3, Informative)
Trying to have good discussions in Digg is futile because of its moderation system. And whenever discussion worthy news are available they are quickly buried by ten articles of what someone somewhere might have said about the color of the new Nintendo console.
Cheers,
Adolfo
Re:That's pretty slow (Score:5, Informative)
Now, typical intermodal containers (as used on big rig trucks) are 8.5' by 8.5' by 40', or 2890ft^3. Converted to metric, this is about 82m^3, which is less than the 138.24m^3 required.
In other words, no, a truck full of DVDs is NOT faster than this connection!*
*unless you put the DVDs on spindles instead of in cases.
Single-channel only (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Filesystem and Ultra320 SCSI are our chokepoint (Score:3, Informative)
Of course, in many applications, latency of varying sorts quickly chews that number down to something a bit more sane.
If you're limited to a hard 20MB/sec over SCSI, the first thing I would suggest is to make sure that you're actually operating at U/320 speeds, and your HBA and drive(s) haven't fallen back to one of the SE modes for some reason (faulty connection, crummy cable, missing / buggy / broken / wrong terminator, etc).
Re:Terabits per second!? (Score:3, Informative)
From Wikipedia:
1 LOC = 20 tebibytes
1 tebibyte = 1,099,511,627,776 bytes
Doesn't sound nearly as impresive, perhaps marketing should stick with 6,984,919,309 nLoc/hr
What kind of DVD ? BluRay ? (Score:2, Informative)
Let's see... Well, Unless DVD can contain more that 40 GB of data (BluRay ?), there is a possibility of overflow in submitter's calculations.
My guess is that it's more like the quivalent of 600 DVD per second which has been transmitted.