New Ethernet Standard — Both 40 and 100 Gbps

Artemis recommends a blog entry that does a nice job of summarizing the history and current state of the Higher Speed Study Group and the IEEE's next-generation Ethernet standard. "When IEEE 802.3ba was originally proposed [there] were multiple possible speeds that were being discussed, including 40, 80, 100, and 120Gbps. While there options were eventually narrowed down to just two, 40 and 100Gbps, the HSSG had difficulties [deciding] on the one specific speed they wanted to become the new standard... [T]wo different groups formed, one which wanted faster server-to-switch connections at 40Gbps and one which wanted a more robust network backbone at 100Gbps... Unable to come up with a consensus the HSSG decided to standardize both 40Gbps and 100Gbps speeds..."

Re:'HSSG'?

[Linkiroth]

High Speeds Standards Group. How hard is it to read the summary? Slashdot: where people don't only RTFA, they don't RTFS.

Re:Ars Technica?

[Anonymous Coward]

More likely is that they both cribbed the same press release.

Re:In other news

[Anonymous Coward]

The Telco's know full and well that once they let the genie out of the bottle, there is no turning back. REAL* broadband service (10+Mb/s at minimum) across the entire US, i.e. DIAL-UP becomes infrastructurably(new word??) unmanageable and non-existent, means Cable TV and Satellite become unstable as a market. Period. The media companies know this, which is why HD mandates keep getting pushed back. Its an all out fight for who can get their fist in the cookie jar first.

Better get used to the idea that HIGHSPEED* Internet EVERYWHERE, is still years away. There is one hope though. And its name is Google......

Re:Looks like

[DaMattster]

Well, if you think about it, Beowulf and similar Linux clusters take advantage of network speed to distribute processing load. This isn't really a case where the network does the computing but with 40 GBs of bandwith, you can perform some serious parallel processing.

Re:why ethernet?

[DFDumont]

>Yep, Token Ring was indeed more efficient. Good luck reviving it.

Token Ring (spitting) was only more efficient as compared to the original ethernet specification, with all of its collisions. Once we went to a switched architecture and reduced all conversations to two participants that advantage evaporated.

Remember this, being deterministically bad is still bad. Have you ever been on a ring with > 200 nodes? Don't.

Ethernet won because it was cheap. It beat token ring to switching. It beat everything else to get to 100Mbps. Now with 1Gbps and 10Gbps firmly entrenched in the market I look forward to deploying 100Gbps links.

Ethernet is (and was) better.

Dennis Dumont
P.S. I've already scavenged all of my lobe cables for their copper.

Re:why ethernet?

[silas_moeckel]

Ethernet is useful because it's cheap, I can attach a 10bt host to a switch and have it transmit the same frame over 100kbt with very little work. I have clients that love Ethernet it's orders of magnitude cheaper than it's main alternative Packet over Sonet. So pretty much it's good enough for most and cheap. In the PC server world the marketing guys want to say they have the latest and greatest copper Ethernet built in and supporting every old standard back to 10bt. This means they ask there chip suppliers to build it and make it cheap. Scale and cutting every corner possible drive down the costs so that it's a couple bucks to add multiple ports of 1000bt today and 10kbt is getting cheaper and cheaper.

Re:Looks like

[brsmith4]

With the 12x QDR InfiniBand spec, 96Gb (after factoring the protocol's overhead) is already on the table and at much lower latencies. This is more helpful for parallel applications (though it really depends on the properties of your application). I've not even worked with 12x nor any applications that would benefit from it. We currently run a 4x SDR setup (which will soon be upgraded to DDR) and it is ample for most of our needs. A cheap 40Gb ethernet solution would be killer for consolidating node management and a storage pathway onto one network. Our current storage solution over 10Gb leaves us with a 25:1 oversubscription ratio which will work quite well for our current crop of applications and how they are used, but it could become a bottleneck in the future.

I think having 40Gb will be really nice once pNFS implementations start to take off. Imagine a pNFS cluster of 32 fully loaded x4500's with 40Gb links between hosts and a 100Gb copper uplink to feed an army processing nodes. Getting close to 1PB of really really fast storage... over NFS and with today's capacities, no less.

Re:why ethernet?

[gad_zuki!]

Probably for quite a bit. The biggest hurdle with ethernet is dealing with half-duplex connections and all the collions/detections. These new standards dont even do half-duplex. Everything is full duplex, thus requiring a switch. You've tossed out your biggest setback right there.

Ethernet still is pretty lean. I can imagine an alternative to it, but it might not be worth the trouble, like the anyLAN stuff from a while back. We also still used TCP, but really dont need all the overhead it generates.

Re:In other news, You are correct Broadband=2Mb/s+

[OldHawk777]

You are correct Broadband=2Mb/s+, all other contrary comments are silly marketeer-spin for politicians and corporatist.
Also, the USA ranks 20+ in telecommunications (we ain't #1), because of corporatist marketeer-spin to silly politicians.

AAMOMFF, the USA ranks #1 in international debt only. We're #1, We're #1, We're #1 in debtor nations. THANK GOD and POLITICIANS!

!HAVEFUN!

Re:why ethernet?

[systemBuilder]

The scaling issue had to do with CSMA/CD, collision detection. To detect collisions, the network propagation diameter/delay must be at most the slot time.

These newer versions of Ethernet apparently don't bother supporting CD. All links must be switched through a hub, period. The hub saves up your packet and prevents collisions, and forwards your packet onto the next link. The "Ether" and "Like Talking" aspect of Ethernet has been lost. Ethernet has become just another framing choice other than SONET, for optical fiber.