Researchers Break Internet Speed Records 140
MosiMosi wrote to let us know about a new development on the Internet2 front. Researchers in Tokyo have advanced the speed of the network, breaking records twice in two days back in December of last year. "On Dec. 30 [researchers] sent data at 7.67 gigabits per second, using standard communications protocols. The next day, using modified protocols, the team broke the record again by sending data over the same 20,000-mile path at 9.08 Gbps. That likely represents the current network's final record because rules require a 10 percent improvement for recognition, a percentage that would bring the next record right at the Internet2's current theoretical limit of 10 Gbps."
almost but not quite (Score:3, Informative)
Re:But... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:But... (Score:2, Informative)
Here's a good theorem though: People care a lot more about latency than bandwidth.
Re:New Speed Record? (Score:5, Informative)
Heck you can get yourself a nice 10gbit/sec line with 10 1gbit lines, ooh la lah
Tom
Re:But... (Score:4, Informative)
You are mixing up latency with bandwidth. The latency (round trip time) of the connection here is 400 hours. The bandwidth (i.e. data rate) is the amount of data divided by the time it takes for the data to travel its own length.
At 100 mph, a station wagon will travel its length in 0.14 seconds. So the bandwidth of a stationwagon packed with 9000 GB of data is about 550 Tbps.
Given a train of station wagons running at 100mph, you could sustain that. Of course with 1440000000 ms ping times, I wouldn't try playing Battlefield 2 over that connection.
Seriously, the distinction is important. If you included transit time when calculating bandwidth, the theoretical maximum bandwidth for a 12,000 bit packet on a 20,000 mile path would be 112 kbps.
Re:New Speed Record? (Score:3, Informative)
Within a data center or a metro area, it's commercially viable to pump tens of gigabits per second of bits from point A to point B using many parallel fiber circuits between the two locations. What makes the Internet2 land speed record (http://www.internet2.edu/lsr/) interesting is adding distance to the problem by multiplying the speed times the distance. The unit of measurement they use is "terabit-meters per second" (Tbmps?). The current record is 272,400 Tbmps, or ~9Gbps over 30000km (1km=1000000m). The transfer rate is really a function of 1) latency adjustments in the data transfer protocol, 2) the minimum transfer speed capable between all points on the network (currently OC192=10Gbps), and 3) the speed of the sending and receiving computers. While OC192 might theoretically be 9.6Gbps, getting the various vendors
switches on different continents to all send packets at line speed for a long period of time with minimal packet overhead can be challenging.
What makes this pointless, though, is that the sending and receiving equipment is in the same location. In their documentation [u-tokyo.ac.jp] they send the bits from a computer in Tokyo through Chicago through Amsterdam and back through Seattle to the same lab in Tokyo. It would be much easier to put a 10GigE fiber between the two machines, but that's not he "point" of the exercise.
Someone has to pay for this. Usually its the country's taxpayers or a company's stockholders.
I'd much rather see benchmarks for transferring N terabytes of real data from one site with lots of disks to another far-away site with lots of disks. Real companies can use that data for pontificating disaster recovery and content/database replication technologies. I'd reckon that Google can beat the multiple stream Internet2 LSR any day they want by pumping petabytes of data between its data centers over multiple 10GigE backbones. Andy Tanenbaum's (or Hal Stern's?) station wagon full of tapes is also a fine competitor.
-ez
Re:Never underestimate... (Score:3, Informative)
You look at a progress bar for entertainment?
On a more serious note, you'd still get in one chunk, so the initial byte wouldn't matter.
What we need to look at is Gigabits per dollar.
Assuming that you were somehow blessed with an ISP that would let you download over a TB/month, and had a 5Mb/s connection (and assuming constant speed), it would take roughly 19.4 days to download.
Assuming a 30-day month and that your ISP charged $40/month, it would come to $25.86 for that one transfer, which would be $0.000003/Mb.
Shipping a 700g package to (anywhere in) Canada via USPS airmail (The Internet is international, after all.) would be $14.50. That comes to $0.000001/MB.
Just my 0.0002 cents.
100 Gigabit already achieved! (Score:2, Informative)
The IEEE expects the standard to be ratified in mid 2008 for the fiber version & copper (CAT8?) to come out within a couple of years after that (late 2009 or 2010).
Siemens achieves 111 Gigabits over 2,400 kilometers
http://presszoom.com/story_127837.html [presszoom.com]
Bell & Lucent labs acheive 107 Gigabits over 2,000 kilometers
http://www.enterprisenetworksandservers.com/month
Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/100_gigabit_Ethernet [wikipedia.org]
Those Internet2 people are just a tad behind... like 10 fold! If Internet2 = 10G, and Internet3 =100G, then really those Internet2 people should be working on Internet4 (Terabit baby!)!
Adeptus