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The Internet Education Science

Nationwide Fiber Optic Science Network 129

Posted by michael from the low-ping-bastards dept.
zCyl writes "An article at SMH describes a large fiber optic network called the National LambdaRail, which has completed 1,084 out of a planned 16,000 kilometers between major universities and research institutions. Upon completion it should transmit 400 Gbps and stretch across the continental U.S. Access to the network will be intentionally restricted to scientists and researchers only 'for research and experimentation in networking technologies and applications'."
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Nationwide Fiber Optic Science Network More

Nationwide Fiber Optic Science Network

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  • And once it goes commercial (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Half that bandwidth will be used by spammers.

  • Spam (Score:1, Redundant)

    by The Snowman ( 116231 ) *

    I wonder how long it will take for spammers to find a way into this network...

    • Re:Spam (Score:1, Redundant)

      by skaffen42 ( 579313 )
      Nah, my bet is on pr0n to make it there first... you kow how things go when working late into the night. :)

    • I would anticipate machines being on both networks (this fiber-optic one and the Internet). Once the machine is comprimised from the Internet side, it could basically act as a gateway from the Internet to the fiber-optic.

      However, I wouldn't anticipate any kind of e-mail appearing very soon on this fiber optic network, so we have yet to see whether or not a spammer would even want on it.
      • I wouldn't anticipate any kind of e-mail appearing very soon on this fiber optic network, so we have yet to see whether or not a spammer would even want on it.
        Pardon, but are you kidding? Think of all those people doing PhDs! "Get your degree from the university of spammersville". It's perfect! Cut out 5 years of research on a 400Gbps network, get your PhD and go home to your 56k... ah. Maybe not.
  • this was called Internet2
  • Linking up universities and research centers with high-speed data communications. That has a real deja-ecoute sound to it.

  • I wonder (Score:5, Interesting)

    by IANAL(BIAILS) ( 726712 ) on Saturday December 06, 2003 @03:29PM (#7649113) Homepage Journal
    Any plans to string a few lines up to Canada and connect our institutions up here?
  • This is just one of the uses I can see for such a system. But being the way humans are since we have more bandwidth will use more bandwidth. We will never have the enough bandwidth to satisfy our needs. Because we will always find a use to the increase of bandwidth.
  • What kind of equipment can actually handle data at those speeds? 50GB/sec is several times faster than even the fastest DDR ram... Is the networking equipment able to run so much faster because it's specialized to do one task?

    • Re:How would you use that? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by meta-monkey ( 321000 ) * on Saturday December 06, 2003 @03:38PM (#7649174) Journal
      Somebody moderated this Interesting? Jesus.

      You're not going to get 50GB/sec from one node to another. it's from one network to another. PCI-X 533 (the next gen PCI-X) can only do 4.3GB/s. However, if you want to connect a cluster of, say, a dozen nodes with PCI-X 533 to another dozen nodes with PCI-X 533 across the country...
    • I suppose that several computers will connect to a single computer in charge of transmitting the traffic. I suppose the speciallized computer could transmit at that speed, but perhaps they put in extra for the future.

    • Re:How would you use that? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by div_2n ( 525075 ) on Saturday December 06, 2003 @03:47PM (#7649225)
      One Cisco 12000 router can easliy move 320Gbps of data. As another poster noted, this kind of capacity is meant to handle many nodes at full speed.
      • Nope. A Cisco 12000 has 16 ports of 10Gbps. It receives 160Gbps, and transmits 160Gbps, so it "can move" only 160Gbps. Cisco calls this "320Gbps." the internet industry calls this "Cisco math." A Juniper T540 has 32 lines of 10Gbps, so it can actually "move" 320Gbps. A big Avici router can do better.
    • That's part of the research; designing equipment that can forward, filter, prioritise, and route traffic at that kind of bandwidth.

    • There are folks who are pushing into this space today. Yes, the equipment might not be there at the moment, but we are not far away. If you take parallelism into account, these data rates are actually quite achievable.

      A list of folks doing work in this space. Examples via the RENs (research and education network) web pages:
      http://apps.internet2.edu/showcase-archiv e .html
      http://www.canarie.ca/press/publications/re search_ horizons.pdf
      http://archive.dante.net/geant/geant -publicity.htm l#SHDTdemo

      Examples

  • In the spirit of public service... (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I volunteer my computer to be a test node on the new system.

  • Rural America? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ksemlerK ( 610016 ) <kurtsemler@@@gmail...com> on Saturday December 06, 2003 @03:41PM (#7649199) Homepage
    Shouldn't getting broadband communication capabilities to rural America be a top priority also? Where I live, I cannot subscribe to DSL due to the poor quality of the telephone lines. Hell, just 4 years ago, the telephone company,(Inland Telephone), changed all the lines from the old aluminum wiring to the "new" copper wire. The fastest I can transfer connect out here is only at 33.6k on a good day. As we speak, I am only connected at 26.4k. I find this assanine, esepecially when I can move 14 miles to town, and have access to DSL, Cable, and WiFi. Out here, the only option for high speed data transfers is sattilite. Far too expensive for me. This should be a major priority if we intend to bring rural america out of the mid-ninteys, and into the 21st century of data transfer speed. Hell, I would be happy if I could connect at just 53k, but I do not think that the monopolistic telephone companies will be upgrading the lines within the next 20 years. After all, the aluminum wiring went out of common usage during the 1970's, when copper wire replaced it. How long am I going to have to wait for 56k capabilities, 40 more years? I will propanbly be dead by then, as that would put me at 65 years old.
    • Exactly. I live in rural Nebraska, and you can't get DSL or cable internet if you live more than a couple miles out of town, and our asshole phone company has no apparent plans I'm aware of to extend the lines. A lot of my friends are still stuck on 44k dialup because that's the only choice they have (Slashdotters without broadband...sad), and it kicks them offline worse than AOL. There needs to be an effort of some sort to make broadband avaliable everywhere, at an affordable cost.
      That all being said, it

    • Urban America (Score:4, Informative)

      by Angram ( 517383 ) on Saturday December 06, 2003 @03:59PM (#7649306)
      You answered your own question: "I can move 14 miles to town, and have access to DSL, Cable, and WiFi"

      The concept of rural is that which is distinguished from the city. While cities are havens for technology, the countryside is for nature. If you want tech, go where tech is, don't get angry because tech won't come to you. It's not cost effective to wire rural areas - isolated household require up to several miles of dedicated lines serving only one customer, which is not cost effective. It would require decades of subscription from you to pay for the lines to your house. This isn't the case in urban/suburban areas where individual houses only require a few dozen feet of cable.

      Oh, and you wouldn't have the internet at all if not for the academics you're trying to fight. If you want a better connection, support the people trying to invent the technology to make it feasible.
      • Wire? How about Wireless?? One tower can serve many many subscribers for a not too bad fixed cost per subscriber. I was told by my local phone guy that 1 DSL switch costs over $1M to install and it can't serve that much volume without adding more capability and more $$$. Fixed Point DSL quality wireless was on the way to rural America when the dot-com bust stopped it. Cable Internet might come to some places as it carries the TV Channels/Entertainment content to subsidize the Internet access. But if you li
        • I don't think wireless is cost effective either. Towers/antennae have limited ranges. Think about cell phones - coverage is minimal in rural areas because there isn't enough money to be made there. Unless a company knows it will have thousands of customers using the service daily/monthly, they don't put up a tower. If you're 14 miles from anything else, then there's probably no chance of a tower to serve you - it's the same issue as cable lines. The tower itself has to be wired to something, and I don't thi
          • The wireless Internet they were going to put in where I live (rural TX about 30 miles from Dallas) was going to serve an 11 mile radius (Line of Sight) from the tower. I spoke to the local guys who were exploring it as I don't have High speed access either and wanted to subscribe even at $50/mo. They never built it, I guess the base was not there for them to make a profit. However, now there are Rural Telecomm Initiatives where the State/Govt might pay some of the startup expenses. I saw something recently
    • It's called capitalism. If some communications company were to lay the infrastructure for high speed networking, it would have to be paid for some way or another. The company would either have to charge the rural customers much more for Internet service, or increase the rates of everyone that they provide service to. If they increase everybodies rates they will be less competitive in big cities and will lose large amounts of business (and revenue) because of it. You made the choice to live out in the co

    • Re:Rural America? (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      It sounds like you need to make friends with someone in town with cable access and offer to mount a Pringles can on his roof.
    • I find this assanine, esepecially when I can move 14 miles to town, and have access to DSL, Cable, and WiFi. Out here, the only option for high speed data transfers is sattilite. Far too expensive for me.

      So don't live in the middle of nowhere. Not running new lines out to you in the middle of nowhere has nothing to do with "monopolistic telephone companies", it wouldn't happen in a totally competitive market either, because it's simply not cost effective to rewire every few years for a few customers ou

    • Re:Rural America? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by way2trivial ( 601132 )
      Why the hell should we worry about the cost for your high speed connection?

      1- PAY THE PREMIUM
      2- MOVE TO TOWN
      3- LIVE WITH CRAPPY DIALUP

      these are your choices.
      I pay taxes, and I own real estate.(well a mortgage)

      If I choose to live in the boonies for lower mortgage costs and lower tax values, I have to give up conveniences like corner coffe shops, and economical internet access..

      Move to new york, and you can have any of a plethora of connection options- including free wifi in places....

    • It's not always a rural issue. My old apt couldn't do dialup beyond 28.8, and I couldn't get DSL, and I'm in a fairly suburban area. My current residence is DSL handicapped as well. I do have cable broadband access, but it seems weird that I can't get DSL. Earthlink told me it had something to do with the local loop being fiber instead of copper.
    • If you want to pay for the cost of bringing broadband to the cows, go right ahead. I don't want to pay for it: I already pay enough for my house (mortgage, taxes, etc.) and ability to live in a high-demand area, that I don't see any reason why I should help further subsidize your decision to live in cheapville.

      To sum:

      PAY FOR IT YOURSELF! PAY FOR IT YOURSELF! PAY FOR IT YOURSELF! PAY FOR IT YOURSELF!

      Clear enough?
      • To sum: PAY FOR IT YOURSELF! PAY FOR IT YOURSELF! PAY FOR IT YOURSELF! PAY FOR IT YOURSELF!
        Hmmm -- well said. OTOH, you know all those road/rail and mass transit subsidies that make it possible for you to live in the city? Let's get rid of them and you can

        "PAY FOR IT YOURSELF! PAY FOR IT YOURSELF! PAY FOR IT YOURSELF! PAY FOR IT YOURSELF!"

        Clear enough?
        • : "PAY FOR IT YOURSELF! PAY FOR IT YOURSELF! PAY FOR
          : IT YOURSELF! PAY FOR IT YOURSELF!"

          : Clear enough?

          I can't agree more. Unfortunately, the state government insists on distributing the cost to those who don't use these resources.

          If it makes you feel any better, I guarantee you I'm paying more than my fair share for the public resources I use, tax rates being what they are and all.

          As a final note, never underestimate a libertarian's desire to stop benefitting unfairly from the productivity of others.
    • The population density in rural America is such that it wouldn't be cost effective to deploy broadband services to 4 customers in a 100 square mile area. I think that getting rural American residents to *want* broadband would be the first step. For that to happen though, you have to get them to understand the computer, and maybe even buy one of their very own. (I mean all of them, not the select 4 who will order broadband if it were offered right now)

      You should call up a major cable/DSL provider and see if
    • Why wait for someone else to bring you broadband? Why not build it yourself? Get together with your neighbours and form a cooperative to bring in the line, then set up wifi repeaters with yagi antennas for the last mile.

      Try googleing for terms like "rural 802.11 cooperative [google.us]".
    • There used to be a technology for using two modems on two phone lines together as one connection....I think one was called "shotgun" or some such? If no longer available from the usual Wintel gang sources then maybe there is a Linux / open source solution? Granted a second line costs money but might be much more affordable than satellite and not suffer from the "lag time" of getting data down from a satellite. Anyone have info on any of this? Thanks in advance._BB
  • Hackers and spammers will quickly target the network and find weak accounts and suddenly warez, porn, and spam will cross the net at ridiculous speeds.
    • Even worse: Jerry Pournelle will get on it and brag about it in his column, starting flamewars and tightened access that innocent people were quietly sneaking until then.

      Hey, it happened last time.

  • Alright, I have accounts on systems that will be connected to this so now I can find out faster than ever that the system I am trying to use is not available due to dedicated use.

  • The interesting thing to me is that the players in this are either universities, hardware vendors, or ISPs.

    It's easy to see what the universities get out of it (no, it's not just p0rn). But the vendors? Aha! They get to do their R&D and call it a donation to a non-profit. They even get Slashdot to give them publicity for it.

    Clever da5ebf%s^H^H^H^H^H^H ooops, sorry, my aluminum foil slipped off my head for an instant. Now I have to go shower again!

  • Spaceballs Reference (Score:3, Funny)

    by perotbot ( 632237 ) on Saturday December 06, 2003 @03:58PM (#7649297) Journal
    Give me Ludicrious speed! ZOOOOMMMMM!!!!!!! My GOD! They've gone to plaid.........
  • so does "scientists and researchers only" include GNU/linux repositories? traditionally universities tend to have contributors to linux and often host mirrors.

    Imagine, a new distro, once uploaded on one university site, could spread across the country in literally no time at all!
  • Distributed clusters of beowulf clusters anyone??? make one humongous supercluster up when you need it just by linking existing clusters...

  • Bandwidth, but what about latency? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Ed Avis ( 5917 ) <ed@membled.com> on Saturday December 06, 2003 @04:10PM (#7649378) Homepage
    If this network is to stretch across the USA then no matter how fast it transfers data, there will still be a noticeable latency between one end and the other. The speed of light is not getting any faster. The limiting factor for serving files over NFS, for example, might end up being latency rater than bandwidth or server performance (if CPUs are also getting faster and RAM cheaper).

    Perhaps in the future bandwidth will be an almost infinite resource and protocols will be designed around minimizing latency. For example for a remote filesystem you might design a server that spews out all changes to all files as they happen - to every other host that is looking at the filesystem. The bandwidth cost of sending unnecessary files is not significant, and it means a saving in latency because file data will be immediately available at the client end rather than requiring a round trip. (This assumes you don't care about locking and race conditions - but classical NFS doesn't anyway.)

    Similarly, web servers might be designed to spew forth a whole bunch of pages you might possibly be interested in as soon as you connect to their site, and your browser's job is to cache them and then show the ones you want. If you want a page that isn't in the set the server sent you, you'll need to make another round trip, and that could be the slowest part. We will certainly need something like this for interplanetary web browsing at acceptable speeds.

  • pr0n? (Score:3, Funny)

    by Lord_Dweomer ( 648696 ) on Saturday December 06, 2003 @04:26PM (#7649497) Homepage
    "Access to the network will be intentionally restricted to scientists and researchers only 'for research and experimentation in networking technologies and applications'."

    I think they mispelled 'pr0n'.

  • Geant movie (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The european research network (up to 10Gbit/s) has an infomercial [dante.net] at their webpage that is interesting, since all the applications and benefits discussed pretty much applies in the US as well.
  • Why not just build this into I2... why make a seperate network for reasearch/whatnot amoung colleges.

  • I can see it now (Score:4, Funny)

    by bobdotorg ( 598873 ) on Saturday December 06, 2003 @04:59PM (#7649688)
    Some poor NSF grant application reviewer will be saying, "WTF is with all of these grad student projects dealing with 'researching and networking simultaneous transfer of multiple large binary multimedia files'. "

  • Internet2 and Lambdarail are different. (Score:4, Informative)

    by zymano ( 581466 ) on Saturday December 06, 2003 @05:20PM (#7649819)

    They are cooperating networks [startap.net]

  • http://www.360networks.com/Our_Networks.asp

    http://www.360networks.com/Our_Networks---North_ Am erica.asp#
  • sounds a lot like how the original internet started out.
    hopefully this will stay as something for the scientists only.

  • Why Yet Another High Speed Research Network? (Score:3, Informative)

    by Crypto Gnome ( 651401 ) on Saturday December 06, 2003 @09:32PM (#7651125) Homepage Journal
    From what I can understand (amongst all the blurb) this LambdaRail is all about a complete network of (lots-and-lots-of) switched 10Gbps Lambdas (optical wavelengths). So at any point you can dedicate N Lambdas to a particular use and guarantee (at a physical/optical level) bandwidth/latency/QoS.

    Specifically, absolutely unconditionally zero impact to any other data transmissions across the network because these transmissions are actually physically (ie optically) seperate and distinct transmissions.

    In short, if we could literally segment a 'slice' off the network and isolate it from everything else running around, what would/could we do with it?

    Internet2 is a completely different concept.

    All the data is transmitted across one network (ie not guaranteed via 'optical separation'; ie 'just like The Internet Today, only much faster') and researching how to route/switch/filter a trillion-zillion packets with minimal latency/guaranteed QoS/additional application-specific functionality and then given those network-abilities researching how to manage that network and what new uses you can apply to that network.With (apparently) the specific intention of eventually, one day, before-the-heat-death-of-the-universe, rolling out said network and enhanced functionality to "the real world/the rest of us humans".
  • "Well, slap me silly and call me Gordon Freeman!"

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