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Technology Science

Researcher Only High Bandwidth Network 209

Posted by samzenpus from the elite-fiber dept.
Icarus1919 writes "A brand-new 10 gigabit per second per user optical fiber network is now available to researchers in the U.S. (compared to Internet2, which offers only 10 gigabits of bandwidth total, regardless of the number of users). The National Lambda Rail, as it is known, is named for the 40 different wavelengths of light it uses to send data within the fiber network. In the past, researchers have complained about the relatively (relative when you're dealing with terabytes of data) small bandwidth they can access to send data, and the addition of the NLR will most likely be a boon to research."
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Researcher Only High Bandwidth Network More

Researcher Only High Bandwidth Network

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  • High Speed, but what about processing? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by pholower ( 739868 ) * <longwoodtrail@NosPam.yahoo.com> on Wednesday October 27, 2004 @09:43PM (#10649275) Homepage Journal
    From what I understand, they will be using quite a bit of the bandwidth in this as well. Do we know how much data must be trasfered at once? Is this continuous data, or is it in chunks? How much ram would it take to hold all of this data until it can be placed unto a disk for storage?

  • This is news? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by SirPhreak ( 122663 )
    I did a paper on this for my introductory networking class LAST YEAR and the topic had been a subject in the class for a few semesters before mine.

  • of course (Score:5, Funny)

    by mrpuffypants ( 444598 ) * <mrpuffypants@gmailTIGER.com minus cat> on Wednesday October 27, 2004 @09:44PM (#10649289)
    the addition of the NLR will most likely be a boon to research."

    and, of course, bittorrent :)
    • heh, Usually having 10 gigabits per second nullifies all possible reasons to have bit torrent in the first place - I mean it only takes 8 seconds to transfer a full DVD.


      Guybrush Threepwood.
      • There is a conspiracy that saids the U.S government might never let home broadband bandwidth exceeding X-number of bits per second for piracy reasons. I guess don't put these 10 gigabit toys in your christmas list anytime soon in the next decade or two.

        • I don't live in the US but considering Telstra's record I won't be putting any 10 gigabit toys on my christmas years for the next century or so.

  • Boo hoo (Score:2, Insightful)

    by detritus` ( 32392 ) *
    I feel so sorry for those researchers, stuck at 20Gb/s... honestly, i know terabyte databases arent that uncommon among researchers (or that common) but honestly how much of a difference is 20Gb/s to 10Gb/s, you might save half the time but to be honest when calculations can take days/weeks this transfer rate isnt going to make a huge difference... (now in my basement that might be a different story...)

    • Re:Boo hoo (Score:5, Informative)

      by Fancia ( 710007 ) on Wednesday October 27, 2004 @09:53PM (#10649353)
      They're both 10Gbps, but the difference is that this new one is 10Gbps per *user,* while Internet2 is 10Gbps for *all* users. That's a rather significant difference, I suspect.

      • Re:Boo hoo (Score:4, Informative)

        by Seanasy ( 21730 ) on Thursday October 28, 2004 @12:04AM (#10650120)

        It is not really 10 Gbps per user. New Scientist got that wrong. It's a fiber-optic infrastructure capable with 40 lambdas max. A lambda is a wavelength of light. They use DWDM [wikipedia.org] to split the light on the fiber into 40 lambdas. One lamdda = 10 Gbps.

        Now, a single user can, for a period of time, get a whole lambda for himself for a particular application. That's a big deal for researchers. But don't think that everyone at an NLR connected institution automatically has a 10 Gbps link to everyone else on NLR. Most of the users, at best, probably have 1 Gbps ethernet to their desktop. This isn't for browsing the web and playing Doom. It's to connect huge data stores in San Diego to supercomputers in Pittsburgh.

    • Re:Boo hoo (Score:4, Informative)

      by doormat ( 63648 ) on Wednesday October 27, 2004 @09:58PM (#10649384) Homepage Journal
      10Gb/s = 1TB transfered in 800 seconds, or 13 minutes 20 seconds. 10Gb/s per user is far far greater than 10Gb aggrigate.
    • hehe, i'm remedial... next time i need to read a bit closer :)

  • Not enough bandwidth? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Spillman ( 711713 ) <spillman@@@gmail...com> on Wednesday October 27, 2004 @09:45PM (#10649305)
    relative when you're dealing with terabytes of data

    They should be recompressing all those movies to Xvid, then they wouldnt have that bandwidth issue. I mean isn't that what you would do if you had a network dedicated to "research"? (the above post was meant to be humorous, not trollish)

  • But I thought... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Phosphor3k ( 542747 ) on Wednesday October 27, 2004 @09:46PM (#10649307)
    most of the Lambda team was killed in that indcident at Black Mesa a few years ago....

  • The application process (Score:5, Funny)

    by Blair16 ( 683764 ) on Wednesday October 27, 2004 @09:47PM (#10649314)
    Me: Hello, I am a researcher and I would like access to this network

    Them: And what is your field of research, sir?

    Me: Why, I am researching human biology and behaviour in group situations.

    Them: Well that sounds very interesting. How exactly would having 10 Gbps help you.

    Me: Glad you asked. First I download all the pr0n I can find, then I watch it...

    Them: Look, this is about the 1000th application we have had that wants to download porn. Good day, sir.

    Me: But, but....

    Them: I said good day!
    • Contrary to popular belief, areas like Biology and Physics indeed do have a lot of data that needs to be transmitted for research.

      Look at gene sequences for instance -- those things are huge. Particular physics experiments generate statistical data that are of the order of gigabytes.

      This most certainly makes a lot of sense, and hopefully it should be widespread, just as how the research and academia helped kickstart the original Internet in the first place =)

      On the other hand, there is no list of the lab
      • This may be a bit off topic, but molecular biology databases aren't really all that huge. There is a lot of processing needed for things like complex searches, but that is about all. Particle physics on the other hand generates HUGE piles of data, as does radio astronomy...more like on the order of terabytes.

        • Re:The application process (Score:5, Interesting)

          by metlin ( 258108 ) * on Wednesday October 27, 2004 @10:40PM (#10649635) Journal
          Well, I've heard that genetic data is huge -- but have never encountered any first hand.

          However I do have first hand experience with particle physics data, and yes those are HUGE. Those are really unweildy and have a lot of work that need to be done on them.

          Some of the particle accelerators on an average generate a few TBs for every collision experiment, and those are pretty huge numbers.
          • hm... I have encountered my own genetic data first hand, though this sentence is all I have to show for it.
          • I'm on the other side of the coin, never done any physics but work in a sequencing lab :)

            Really, most of the space needed for sequencing is temp space. There is a hell of a lot of overlap in a typical shotgun sequence read, but once you start making large contigs you can throw the overwhelming majority of the data out. I don't do much of the computer side, so I don't know real numbers (I'm just a biologist that can code a bit of Perl, which in my tiny local neighborhood makes me a God...to at least three

    • Re:The application process (Score:4, Funny)

      by Geoffreyerffoeg ( 729040 ) on Wednesday October 27, 2004 @10:03PM (#10649427)
      pr0n

      How do you do that over the telephone without it sounding like "pron"? Do you say "pruh", dial 0, and say "nn" or something?
  • ...10 gigabit per second per user... Guaranteed switched bandwidth? But you have to hit some kind of limit at some point, right? I need more data...

    • Exactly. Every guarantee has an equal and opposite refusal. In this case they have only 40 lambdas, so they can only support 40 users at a time.

    • 1 user == 1 of 40 wdm channels (Score:4, Informative)

      by j1m+5n0w ( 749199 ) on Wednesday October 27, 2004 @10:53PM (#10649691) Homepage Journal
      ...10 gigabit per second per user... Guaranteed switched bandwidth? But you have to hit some kind of limit at some point, right? I need more data...

      By "user" they mean "institution connected to our network" not "individual person". As the previous reply said, they're limited to 40 wdm [wikipedia.org] channels, one per user. To put this in perspective (from wikipedia):

      The first WDM systems combined two signals and appeared around 1985. Modern systems can handle up to 160 signals and can expand a basic 10 Gbit/s fibre system to a theoretical total capacity of over 1.6 Tbit/s over a single fiber pair.

      Anyone know what the shannon limit for single mode fiber is?

      -jim

  • Stop the Press! (Score:5, Funny)

    by dancingmad ( 128588 ) on Wednesday October 27, 2004 @09:50PM (#10649335)
    So Bush was right and there are internets?!?!

    • Re:Stop the Press! (Score:5, Interesting)

      by irc.goatse.cx troll ( 593289 ) on Wednesday October 27, 2004 @09:54PM (#10649361) Journal
      Internet2 has been around for years. Theres atleast 3 government/military networks that use the InternetProtocol. Thats just in the US, who knows what kind of private nets are out there in forign nations.

      So, looks like monkeyboy knows more than you.
      • There are private networks and interconnected networks, but there's still only one Internet.

        But its all bananna's to monkey boy.

        • Re:Stop the Press! (Score:4, Interesting)

          by LinuxGeek ( 6139 ) <djand...nc@@@gmail...com> on Thursday October 28, 2004 @12:06AM (#10650133)
          But its all bananna's to monkey boy.

          Ok, let me see if I understand you correctly. You cannot properly spell 'banana', and you think Bush is a moron? Mr. Bush is the first president to hold an MBA [americanthinker.com] from any school, let alone from Harvard.

          Bush's SAT [freerepublic.com] scores were higher than Kerry's too. I bet both candidates are very aware of the DARPA Net derived Internet, Internet2 and many secret things that we will never even see. Neither John Kerry nor George Bush got where they are today without being both intelligent and politically savvy.
          • An MBA is an anti-degree; having one is an indication of lower intelligence on the part of the degree holder, not higher, than not having one is. That being said, I agree that any post which disparages someone's intelligence should be carefully proofread, or it loses its effect.
    • There are multiple large scale IP networks, and the Internet proper isn't the only international one. I suppose it depends on how you use the term. Since an intranet is a network within your building or at most orginazation, then a research network like I2 would qualify as an internet. However there is only one Internet with a capatial I, that being the one we connect to.

      Difference between the onter internets and THE Internet is more or less barrier for entry and scope. The Internet has no real barrier for
    • He might be wrong on lots of counts, but not on this one. Internets refers to a collection of networks with common links, and is a generic term that needn't refer to the protocol. The Internet is the largest collection of such networks, and is a non-generic term for an internet that uses the IP protocol.
  • ... oh wait, this isn't Fark. My bad.

  • And if you remember your history... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by physicsphairy ( 720718 ) on Wednesday October 27, 2004 @09:54PM (#10649366)
    This is really not so different from how the present internet got started. Will researchers pave the way for a new international fiberoptic network?
    • No, because the original one snuck up on governments and large corporations (read: China and the RIAA) and I doubt they'll let that happen twice.
    • Then an idiot from ATT took it over and the company sank in a sea of red ink. Then some stupid cable company took it, crimped upload to 30kBs, forbade "servers", forced dhcp, and did everything they could to make it useful for no more than browsing the corporate billboard. It's not that the network could not handle it, it's that someone did not want it to. From 1.5mbs no restrictions but "thou shalt not spam" to Hollywood whore in 6 months.

      That's recent history.

      Why should I expect more? All I imagine

      • It was worse for me. I had a 4 mbit/sec symmetric connection from @Home, back during their heydey. It was great, really, they couldn't care less about server activity, whatever. It was just a fat, symmetric pipe with which I could do as I pleased. Then @Home's poor management (purchasing Blue Mountain for $800 mil didn't help) forced them into Chapter 11, and AT&T Deadband took it over and I went from that awesome connection to a mere 1.5 mbit/sec down 256 kbit/sec up in less than an hour. And ...

    • Actually, it's better. A 10 Gbps backbone isn't that big of a deal. It's not just a 10 Gbps network. It's a 40 lambda infrastructure -- 10 Gbps being just on lambda. The 10 Gbps IP network isn't the big news. The big news is the infrastructure.

      Consider this: you're a weather researcher modeling tornadoes at the University of Oklahoma. You're running a simulation on a Cray in Pittsburgh and you need transfer terabytes of data back and forth. A 10 Gbps shared network isn't going to cut it. You'll either dis

  • obligitory comparison... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by endersdouble ( 719120 ) on Wednesday October 27, 2004 @09:55PM (#10649373)
    how does this compare to a station wagon full of DVDs hurtling down the highway?
    • Or a puppy first learning to walk?

    • Add a turbo for lower ping rates. (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Charcharodon ( 611187 ) on Wednesday October 27, 2004 @10:21PM (#10649519)
      Yes never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon, I think they call them crossover vehicles these days, full of discs going down the highway. They've been saying that just upgrading the media every couple of years or so. The first time I heard it was floppies.

      Yes that is true they actually did a comparison, which if I remeber correctly endedup here on slashdot about the "bandwidth" of the US postal service just using Netflix DVD rentals and AOL disks as the "data" being transferred. It was astonishing that with just those the bandwidth was something like a factor 300 times faster than then internet in mbps and resulted in more total data being transfered than the internet over the course of a month.

      Actually I came to that realization myself a few years back at the hight of my MP3 collecting days. A 40gb drive passed among friends through the mail was much faster and had better results than looking on the net.

    • Lets see, single sided single layer. 4.5GB DVD.
      this is 2 of them a second (yea rough math, but its about to get rougher)
      Now lets say with cases (without and this number would be much much bigger) you can stack about a 50 vertically and maybe 150 of these stacks = 7500+4.5GB.
      33750 GB you can fit in a station wagon. Lets say your taking this from new york to LA.
      2.5 Days approximatly driving flat out without stopping. 225000 seconds
      33750GB/225000seconds
      only .15GB per second Weak.
      Of course with a shorter distan
    • If you figure a 650 MB data CD put in the mail that takes 7 days to reach its destination (fairly slow for 1st-class mail), then that's 9 kb/sec for 37 cents (I figure you can send one CD by first-class mail), plus the cost of a CD.

      That's over half a million dollars per user per year, if you figure 10 cents per CD and you want 10 Gb/sec.
    • How many libraries of congress per second is that stationwagon?
    • 10Gbits / 8 bits per byte = 1.1GB. So you'll have to write DVDs faster than 1.1GB/sec, read them faster than that, at a rate that allows for 55mph times distance.

      Good luck and please let me know where I can get one of those burners.
    • how does this compare to a station wagon full of DVDs hurtling down the highway?

      Depends, how many rods to the hogshead does the station wagon get?
    • better ping times, less chance of losing all data

  • Sure, but how fast can you save your data? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Datagod ( 613152 ) on Wednesday October 27, 2004 @09:57PM (#10649382)
    I haven't seen too many disk sub-systems out there that can store data faster than 640 Mbits per second. Will 10Gbit per second really be that useful? Maybe I am wrong...
    • It's not about saving data... it's about PARALLEL computing. Just think about it. Currently there are computing clusters which use the internet for their calculations. All that transfer mixed up with SPAM, pop-ups, the occasional 419 SCAM, and tons, tons of downloads from other users.

      We're talking about 100% network use for scientific purposes. Like, genome research, perhaps...

      That's what the researcher-only networks were about in the first place.
    • That's easy. Use striping. Each disk in the array handles 640 MBits/s, so stacking 20 in parallel gives you enough performance to handle the data coming in. You'd need pretty fancy software to stripe across so many devices, as each in themselves is likely to be an array of disks, but I don't see any theoretical objection to this.

    • It seems you are making the assumption that literally every bit they transfer (and every bit you transfer, by making that assumption) will be stored on a storage device. I'd doubt that is the case ...

  • Different units (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 27, 2004 @09:59PM (#10649396)

    10 gigabit per second per user

    What is that in breasts per second?

  • Video conferencing application - a real boost (Score:3, Insightful)

    by slackerny ( 824897 ) on Wednesday October 27, 2004 @10:13PM (#10649465)
    I think the main application of this improvement is that it could boost the video conferencing applications or video streaming (which has seen so less improvement in the recent days). When talking about 10 Gb/s bandwidth, it does not help anything with our system unless you are dealing with huge amounts of data - like video streaming or conferencing.

    Also considering the fibre optic communication(FOC) systems it is been quite some time since we knew the potential of the FOC. Seriouly, we had 1Tb/s experimental systems 4 years back and only now do we have a 10Gb/s per user system.

    make love
    make: *** No rule to make target `love'. Stop.

    ps:Sorry I forgot the html formatting and reposting it for better understanding!
  • In the past, researchers have complained about the relatively (relative when you're dealing with terabytes of data) small bandwidth they can access to send data, and the addition of the NLR will most likely be a boon to research."

    The complaints will continue. There's always a larger data set to move, and complaining is human nature. This new network is a good thing but are they spending time/money on educating the researchers on the most efficient use of the network? That'll increase the longevity of the

  • So what qualifies as a researcher... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Trogre ( 513942 ) on Wednesday October 27, 2004 @10:15PM (#10649482) Homepage
    ... in the US?

    What do you need to be researching? Who do you need to be affiliated with?

    Do people like RMS count?

    • What do you need to be researching? Who do you need to be affiliated with?

      Well, there's a useful pamphlet (PDF, 830 kB) [nlr.net] on the National LambdaRail website [nlr.net].

      It states that there will be a solicitation/application process that will peer review project proposals. The intent is for NLR to be used both as a tool for other research, and also for research into networking technology (both protocols and hardware).

      To answer your question, you need to convince their scientists that you have an interesting projec

  • This is progress (Score:4, Insightful)

    by shaneh0 ( 624603 ) on Wednesday October 27, 2004 @10:30PM (#10649578)
    You may remember that the "internet 1" was a researcher-only network once and we all know how that turned out.

    With even more competition now that the Electric companies can offer broadband service I think we'll see a Moores-law type situation in Telecom (albeit with a longer cycle then 18 months). With networks like this serving as a proving ground for new technology I think we'll see a speed-race among providers. Americans love Horsepower, RPM, GhZ, and they may not know it yet but Mb/s. Shane
  • Do you want your confidential data shooting across this network in plaintext?

    Alternatively, do you want to encrypt data fast enough for it to be worth it?

  • data reception? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Chuck Bucket ( 142633 )
    That's a great speed, but how much data can be processed on the recieving end? Would it just shove it into RAM or ? I'm just trying to think how a network card would handle/distribute that much data at once.

    CB#@(*(#$_@J

    • Re:data reception? (Score:2, Informative)

      by KevinM ( 45416 )
      While some tests have been run with simple off-the-shelf-hardware, in most cases the 10Gbps connections will be shared amongst a cluster of machines or a high-end machine.

      For some relevant projects actually using NLR right now:
      TeraGrid [teragrid.org]
      OptIPuter [optiputer.net]

  • So what happens when some reasearcher jams the laser shield open with a crate, and subsequently blows a hole in the side of the Lamda research complex?

  • More information (Score:4, Informative)

    by Rufus211 ( 221883 ) <rufus-slashdotNO@SPAMhackish.org> on Wednesday October 27, 2004 @10:56PM (#10649706) Homepage
    More information is available at nlr.net [nlr.net] including a network map [nlr.net]. The first link that went up was between Chicago and the Pittsburgh Supercomputer Center [psc.edu] which is run by CMU (where I go). The only problem I think we only have 1 (maybe 2) gigabit links to them, so the bandwidth isn't available onto campus.
  • does this mean they are selecting light colours / frequencys to route across the physical network? you want to send to computer1 blue light routes more directly too it with less relay points.
    switching paths by frequency could really speed things up especially if the frequency used represented the path between computers. and the breaks in transmission the data
  • carrying 20 boxes, each holding three terabytes? FedEx will get it there the next morning.

    Someone else do the math - I'm tired...

    RS

  • I think a network like that would be good in the commercial sector, I think I'll go lobby to make sure that it's open for public use. ;-)
  • I have postulated some time ago that 10/10 Gbps is the magic number for home users. Once everyone has that, we can all chill and enjoy it for a century or so. Until then, we will keep needing more and more speed.

    We'll see if I'm right or not in 20-30 years. I don't think we'll see these kind of speeds until then.

    • I have postulated some time ago that 10/10 Gbps is the magic number for home users. Once everyone has that, we can all chill and enjoy it for a century or so.

      I have four mod points, and not one of them can be used to mod a post Naïve. Damn.

  • HDless PC (Score:2, Interesting)

    by droper ( 676529 )
    Sounds like we are a step closer to not needing secondary storage anymore.
  • compared to Internet2, which offers only 10 gigabits of bandwidth total

    So if I run ethernet to the machine down the hall, and do a big file transfer, it slows down the entire INTARWEB-2 for everyone?

    I'll stick with INTARWEB-1, thanks.
  • Just wait until we see the researchers' machines turn zombie and start DOS attacking...
  • Last week we celebrated
    the 50th anniversary of CERN [www.cern.ch] (European Laboratory for High Energy Physics).
    There was an "Open Day" organized (visits to tens of interesting places at CERN) and the Computing Center was one of the most popular places.
    I was honoured to be one of the guides there.

    The LHC will produce proton-proton collisions 40 million times per second.
    Even after a first pre-selection of the events, there will be around 100 "potentially interesting" events per second that have to be recorded for furth
  • I wouldn't know whether to masturbate to the pr0n I'd be downloading or the transfer speeds...
  • If you took all the data they sent in 58 seconds and put it on floppies, and then you laid all of those floppies in a row, it'd form a line 1/3 of a mile long! You could send over 1000 copies of the Complete Works of Shakespeare in that time! And if you took all of that data and wrote it in a 6 point font on a large sheet of paper which you handed out to all of the people in a state the size of Texas then the total amount of money they would have to spend to deal with the damage caused by eyestrain would be

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