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Network Communications Japan Stats The Internet Technology

NTT and Partners Show 1 Petabit/Sec Transfer Over 50km of Fiber 59

Posted by timothy from the wake-me-up-when-it's-petabytes-instead dept.
symbolset writes "NTT and some partners, in a late paper to the ECOC 2012, show a successful transmission of 1 petabit per second data transfer over a 12-core optical fiber 52.4 km long." How long that transfer speed would take to transfer one Library of Congress's worth of data all depends on who you ask.
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NTT and Partners Show 1 Petabit/Sec Transfer Over 50km of Fiber More

NTT and Partners Show 1 Petabit/Sec Transfer Over 50km of Fiber

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  • Wow. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by jtownatpunk.net ( 245670 ) on Sunday September 23, 2012 @05:40AM (#41426987)

    That's a lot of porn.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Hate to break it to you, but petabits/s measures data transfer rate, not volume.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      That's a lot of porn.

      It sure is! I can't wait for that kind of bandwidth coming to the US!

      And I can tell you, this announcement has made me a petaphile!

      • You could use up your monthly bit-cap in about five seconds... USA! USA! USA!

        • Re:Wow. (Score:4, Informative)

          by sg_oneill ( 159032 ) on Sunday September 23, 2012 @08:36AM (#41427589)

          You could use up your monthly bit-cap in about five seconds... USA! USA! USA!

          I dunno, I'd be pretty happy with a 655360 gigabyte bit-cap if it'd take 5 whole seconds to chew it up at this speed.

          • OMG. You would need a script to generate all the zero's needed for the amount of damages the music companies would sue for if you used that just for downloading music.

    • It doesn't matter. You'd be done "streaming" in under a minute whether you have 10 Megabits/sec or 1 Petabit/sec.
      • 1990s : "I don't really want a 56k modem, my 9600 transfers my email just fine."
        2000s : "I don't really want a cable modem, my 56k does text and images just fine."
        2012 : "I don't really want uberfast fiber, my shows stream just fine. "

        Come on! Get on board already! Get on that goddamn truck!
        • WOOOSH!!!
          • Oh, right, dirty jokes. Does that really count as OVER my head?
            • It was over your head because you didn't figure out what I was saying. I am basically saying something very similar to you. If someone hears about Petabit/second access and all they have to say is "that's a lot of porn" they completely lack imagination and an ability to think of the possibilities.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by fa2k ( 881632 )

      Yeah, that will really get your ECOC going

    • That's a lot of porn.

      Score: 3, Insightful
      Welcome to Slashdot ;-)

  • NSA data gathering capability (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Taco Cowboy ( 5327 ) on Sunday September 23, 2012 @05:41AM (#41426989) Journal

    I read TFA, click on one of the links, and ...

    http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2011-05/every-six-hours-nsa-gathers-much-data-stored-entire-library-congress [popsci.com]

    Every day NSA gathers 4 times the amount of data of the entire library of congress

    I do not question the availability of the disk space for all those data - after all, NSA has an unlimited budget on purchasing hard disks.

    But ...

    How are they going to crunch all those data?

    How big the machine they have to crunch at least 40 petabytes of data every-single day?

    And we are not talking about simple crunching - they need to sieve through all those data to find things that are worth to keep - and then, many of those things that are worth to keep may themselves be encrypted (terrorists ain't stupid these days) - and it takes a helluva juice to decrypt all those encrypted data.

    It's truly mind boggling !!

    • Re:NSA data gathering capability (Score:4, Insightful)

      by neokushan ( 932374 ) on Sunday September 23, 2012 @05:45AM (#41426997)

      Just look at commercial institutions that do the same thing. Google, for example.

    • Funny thing is I remember back when I worked at a university, our Remote Sensing and Optics department was gathering something like 40 megabytes of data every single day and it seemed like a ridiculous amount of data. A group was working on a project to build a 4 terabyte storage system.

      Today, I have a 26tb array to hold my media.

      • 26tb for personal space is still pretty ridiculous by todays standards. I'm willing to bet the average personal space people have is no higher than 4tb.

        • With every blu-ray holding as much as 50 gigs of data, you'd be surprised how much data average people have stored in their homes. I just happen to have mine consolidated.

          Besides, why would I want to be average?

          • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

            by CrashandDie ( 1114135 )

            Some would argue that not wanting to be "average" is being average.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by AK Marc ( 707885 )
            From the numbers I can guess, there have been about $10,000,000,000 of BluRay sold in the US. That's about $33 per person or about $90 per house. How many BluRay's does one get for $90? About 3? The "average" person should have about 150 GB in BluRay. The "average" house should have more than that in DVDs and CDs, though I'll not do the math on that one.

            You are far from average, and presuming yourself to be in any way representative of "average" is silly.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AHuxley ( 892839 )
      The NSA always got around this logical issue with a few simple tricks.
      Collect everything.
      Sort for words of interest.
      Sort for people you know.
      Sort for people you want to know who are linked to people you know
      After you have done that, the amount of info encrypted back to the USA is not really not massive anymore.
      The new trick is front companies, buying in bulk from everything and everyone in the private sector.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AK Marc ( 707885 )
        The problem in a practical sense is that they find the words and people of interest to look for only after an incident, and rarely before.

    • The data doesn't all have to be processed to be useful. Collecting it enables them to dig in deeper when they find Someone Unusual - probably automated at first, and then with human review if you're Really Interesting.

      The rest of the data just sits in storage because they're not sure which bits will become interesting at the time of collection.

    • I do not question the availability of the disk space for all those data - after all, NSA has an unlimited budget on purchasing hard disks.

      It says "gather", not "store".

      But ...How are they going to crunch all those data?

      It's not all gathered in one place. If each wiretap box has its own CPU then the compute load will be very widely spread.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • "How are they going to crunch all those data?"

      They don't need to crunch everything they only need to monitor most likely sources of communication. Think IM, email, etc. With deep packet inspection, etc. They only have to catch stuff from apps people are using. Otherwise they are making their lives more difficult trying to chew through irrelevant data.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gl4ss ( 559668 )

      why do you think it's secret? so that the waste isn't evident.

      the data mining doesn't have to be effective - it'll still pay the bills. the bigger the expenses the bigger the money flowing to the guys deciding those expenses.

  • LoC per second is just bandwidth (Score:5, Funny)

    by jd ( 1658 ) <imipakNO@SPAMyahoo.com> on Sunday September 23, 2012 @06:14AM (#41427047) Homepage Journal

    To be a true measure, you need latency as well. After all, you can't really play a decent MMORG if the latency is through the roof.

    As two dimensional values confuse people, I suggest dividing the bandwidth by the delays in getting it, giving you Libraries of Congress per second per fillibuster.

  • x shows a successful transmission of y bits per second over a z-core optical fiber w km long.

    Is that good? Is that much faster than before, or only a bit?

  • The future is now. Soon every American home will integrate their television, phone, and computer. You'll be able to visit the Louvre on one channel, and watch female mud wrestling on another. You can do your shopping at home, or play Mortal Kombat with a friend in Vietnam. There's no end to the possibilities.

    • Soon every American home will integrate their television, phone, and computer

      get back to me when I am able to get broadband internet. by the legal definition of broadband in the USA, it is actually not available to me at all in my current location.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by emilper ( 826945 )

        "the legal definition of broadband in the USA"

        what is the legal definition of broadband ? not being snarky, really don't know ... all I could find that seemed relevant was "broadband is faster than dial-up"

        • 4 Mbps down, 1Mbps up [globalgeeknews.com] is the FCC's definition of broadband. Now you know.

          My ISP doesn't even offer it :(

          We all know what broadband really means, but the FCC gets that people just think it means high speed internet, so they co-opted it. Lame, and yet not lame, and yet still lame.

    • Why "every American home"?
      US-centrism much?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Z34107 ( 925136 )

        Let me be the first to welcome you to Slashdot, an American technology site.

        • That a website reporting news is based in America does not mean that the repercussions of said news would be limited to the USA, or even that the events depicted happened or will develop in the US.

          Only in Japan for example did a mad scientist manage to make a time machine out of a phone and a microwave.

  • I think Slashdot has to get it right. We use LOC (Library of Congress) as the analogy for this story because it deals with transfer speed. For anything else, we use a car analogy and it always isn't the same car.

    I propose a change. We need to standardize. Therefore, we should use the number of mini-vans (each filled with books) that can be parked in the LOC. I only suggest we use a mini-van since it has more storage space. This is challenging in itself to standardize since mini-vans must be parked so we wil

  • Now my boss is going to want me to implement it commercially.

  • Or, put another way... (Score:3)

    by GrpA ( 691294 ) on Sunday September 23, 2012 @09:44AM (#41428111)

    If you created a fiber loop around a drum, using 50 km of fiber and this technology, you would be able to use it as ultra-high-speed storage

    It would store 20.8 Gbytes of information with read-write speeds of 1 Pbit per second, and a random access r/w time of 166 microseconds max.

    Not bad eh? But unlikely to come in 2.5" format I suspect.

    GrpA

  • How long that transfer speed would take to transfer one Library of Congress's worth of data all depends on who you ask.

    Depends how much .jpg compression you use...

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