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Networking The Internet Science

Research Scientists To Use Network Much Faster Than Internet 50

nickweller writes with this story from the Times about the Pacific Research Platform, an ultra-high-speed fiber-optic research infrastructure that will link together dozens of top research institutions. The National Science Foundation has just awarded a five-year $5 million dollar grant for the project. The story reports:The network is meant to keep pace with the vast acceleration of data collection in fields such as physics, astronomy and genetics. It will not be directly connected to the Internet, but will make it possible to move data at speeds of 10 gigabits to 100 gigabits among 10 University of California campuses and 10 other universities and research institutions in several states, tens or hundreds of times faster than is typical now.
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Research Scientists To Use Network Much Faster Than Internet

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  • by Anonymous Coward
    Or is this just really slow news about Internet 2?
    • by Anonymous Coward

      Throw millions of tax dollars at ISPs to upgrade their systems, what do we get: dead fiber.
      Throw millions of tax dollars into creating a faster 'research internet' (internet2), what do we get: dead fiber.

      Forgive me if I'm a bit skeptical about throwing more millions of tax dollars to make the next faster internet.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    No, it's here.. We'll always have it. Some people are still on dialup. I don't know if I like the idea of computer 'islands'. We're just going back to old fashion isolation.

    • Imagine what 100 gig end point routers, switches and even NICs are going to cost them. Then imagine what the same devices would cost if the "scientists" were not greedy and said others could play too. But I guess they'll feel a lot more important this way playing with exclusive toys. It isn't their money anyway, most or all of it comes from the taxpayers.
      • by Anonymous Coward

        I think you missed the "how the Internet got built" story.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward

        At a university I worked at in the past, we had routers that could hand way more than 100G of data ten years ago, and could even put that on a single fiber with a multiplexer. It was off the shield equipment. Projects like this use off the shelf equipment, stuff that is already used in major connections and backbones elsewhere. There is no being greedy and saying others can't play. It wasn't cheap (well, sometimes the routers were free from the vendor since they wanted our help testing out new equipment

    • Basically, they've decided that they need to be prepared for the widespread availability of 8K screens across campuses, and the practicality of 5000 simultaneous 8K streams.
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • > 100gbps

        A hell of a lot more than 8k!

        Man, I wonder what kind of porn that will be...[looks up to the stars wistfully, eyes like glazed saucers, the wonder of the infinite]

  • Canada did it first (Score:5, Informative)

    by CastrTroy ( 595695 ) on Sunday August 02, 2015 @06:42PM (#50236913)

    Canada did it first [wikipedia.org], And it's country-wide. It can also do speeds as high as 100 Gbit/s but generally operated at 10 Gbit/s.

  • Pointless article (Score:5, Interesting)

    by 3.14159265 ( 644043 ) on Sunday August 02, 2015 @07:09PM (#50237031)
    It's Sunday night, so let's be picky:
    1) 10 or 100 gigabits is not a measure of speed.
    2) the "current" internet could very well exhibit the same capabilities if it didn't have to carry all the porn streaming left and right for millions of clients. A conventional network connection rated at xxx could run at that rate if you didn't have any sort of congestion, something this new network will likely not suffer because it doesn't have porn (yet). Any dedicated link will give you that. Heck, any 100Gb/s optical channel will give you 100Gb/s to play with.
    3) "designed with hardware security features to protect it from the attacks" from the "internet" - by not having a direct connection to the internet in the first place? Fancy words, but it'll do.
    4) $5 million to weave a cluster of fibers? Sounds too cheap.

    Finally, the article says that "the new network will also serve as a model for future computer networks", but doesn't say anything about protocols, routing, etc. Nothing.
    • by Anonymous Coward

      It's true. This is all BS. The internet is built on the same tech, it just has to service a lot more than ~20 locations. The internet in Japan has been at these speeds for a while.
      This is some Ministry of Truth shit I think. Some kind of brainwashing to make Americans accept when the internet doesn't get any cheaper but does get slower. It's going to happen. They are conditioning us! They must still be salty 'bout that denied merger.

    • by nadaou ( 535365 )

      try the sister article linked from soylent news.

      they are experimenting with a replacement for tcp/ip optimized for very large packet sizes.

    • by drolli ( 522659 )

      I guess it means:

      a) We rent existing but empty channels/fibers from providers (otherwise 5M would be impossible)

      b) We dont connect it to the internet; although they sadly dont mention if they have a private internet (not news) or if they use another protocol to avoid the negative side effects of TCP/IP (little news, unless they show the numbers)

      c) If I assume they are talking about 10 to 100 Gbit per second, then it would not be so fast) as far as I understand, single channels in fibers go up to 40GBit/s

      • by Bengie ( 1121981 )
        Newer DWMD multiplexing tech allows for 400Gb-500Gb super-channels and near future versions are about to have 1Tb/s super-channels. A 500Gb single super-channel can support anything from 50 10Gb channels to a single 500Gb channel. Of course the current max bandwidth across all channels in a single fiber is about 32Tb/s, so they'll have to make do. 32Tb/s can have 320 100Gb/s streams. Suddenly 100Gb sounds slow.
  • by rriven ( 737681 ) <slashdot@rriven.com> on Sunday August 02, 2015 @07:15PM (#50237055) Homepage

    Sounds a lot like Internet 2

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

    In 2006, Internet2 announced a partnership with Level 3 Communications to launch a brand new nationwide network, boosting its capacity from 10 Gbit/s to 100 Gbit/s. In October, 2007, Internet2 officially retired Abilene and now refers to its new, higher capacity network as the Internet2 Network.

  • Welcome to the 100-Gb/s club California...

    OARnet [oar.net] in Ohio has had this for a while now...
  • This sounds pathetic (Score:3, Interesting)

    by strstr ( 539330 ) on Sunday August 02, 2015 @08:07PM (#50237323)

    Internet 2 was already supposed to be faster than the regular Internet.

    This announcement of 10Gbits to 100Gbits is not impressive .. that is a typical server connection these days.

    What would be impressive? Multiple terabits or even petabit network, dedicated to the schools, allowing each connected device maximum throughput simutaneously.

    • by Kjella ( 173770 )

      This announcement of 10Gbits to 100Gbits is not impressive .. that is a typical server connection these days.

      Heck, in March the first residential 10G/10G Internet connection was delivered here in Norway from Bayonette, source [google.com] via Google translate. They have a 24xGbit hub with 2x10G for expansion and instead give you a direct line. Note that it mistranslates the prices, it's 5999 NOK = $727/month for 10G, 3-400 NOK = $36-50 for 1G so I'd call it mostly a publicity stunt but for a dedicated research network it's peanuts.

      Now 100 Gbit is a bit more exotic but I know "The Gathering", a 5000 people data party had a 100

  • by Irate Engineer ( 2814313 ) on Sunday August 02, 2015 @08:45PM (#50237531)
    Isn't this really just a multi-campus intranet? A research organization needs to deal with data coming in at a rate of Library of Congresses per second (LoC/s) and they simply need to have devoted pipes to handle it. Piping it through the normal campus servers sharing bandwidth with 20,000 students streaming music and porn wasn't working for them.
  • by Tony Isaac ( 1301187 ) on Sunday August 02, 2015 @10:15PM (#50237897) Homepage

    Internet isn't a speed, it's a concept. The Internet can have connections at any speed.

    • But in reality the Internet speed (for a given 2 entities) is the average bandwidth between their 2 connection points as measured over a statistically significant number of transfers.

      As others stated thanks to cat videos and porn, this is a lot slower than even modest dedicated hardware.

    • by mcrbids ( 148650 )

      The other thing is that the Internet has a lot of overhead.

      When it was originally developed, networking was very slow and unreliable, so small packets were picked. As hardware has improved and available bandwidth has grown exponentially, the benefits of larger packet sizes are mostly lost since, for compatibility reasons, everybody continues to use tiny packet sizes in order to avoid dropped/fragmented packets.

  • Very nice, but hardly new. Both ESnet [es.net] (U.S. DOE research network) and Internet2 [internet2.edu], the national collegiate research network have been running at Nx100G to major research sites and the rest of the Internet for at least two years. They provide Internet service places like CalTech, MIT, the University of Califorrnia, Berkeley Lab and Fermilab. These are full production networks with ESnet already moving vast amounts of data from the LHC to the US for storage and dissemination to many public and private research

  • I assume no lessons will be learned from 'Internet 1', with security - if any at all - slapped on after the fact.
  • Why didn't they just wait for a bid from a competitive corporation to build such a network in our wonderful and glorious free market and capitalist America?

Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes. -- Henry David Thoreau

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