Caltech and UVic Set 339Gbps Internet Speed Record 79
MrSeb writes "Engineers at Caltech and the University of Victoria in Canada have smashed their own internet speed records, achieving a memory-to-memory transfer rate of 339 gigabits per second (53GB/s), 187Gbps (29GB/s) over a single duplex 100-gigabit connection, and a max disk-to-disk transfer speed of 96Gbps (15GB/s). At a sustained rate of 339Gbps, such a network could transfer four million gigabytes (4PB) of data per day — or around 200,000 Blu-ray movie rips. These speed records are all very impressive, but what's the point? Put simply, the scientific world deals with vasts amount of data — and that data needs to be moved around the world quickly. The most obvious example of this is CERN's Large Hadron Collider; in the past year, the high-speed academic networks connecting CERN to the outside world have transferred more than 100 petabytes of data. It is because of these networks that we can discover new particles, such as the Higgs boson. In essence, Caltech and the University of Victoria have taken it upon themselves to ride the bleeding edge of high-speed networks so that science can continue to prosper."
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
So at home... (Score:3, Informative)
I could blow thru my bandwidth cap in just under a second.
Inter-networking (Score:2, Informative)
For those who can't be bothered to read the whole article, the packets actually went over the Internet. It wasn't a simple case of direct optic fibre connection. It is impressive that the backbone can now achieve such bandwidth.
Re:The point (Score:3, Informative)
Now 339Gbps isn't such a big deal. NEC wizards have already passed 101 Tbps - 300 times as much over a single fiber [wikipedia.org], though not to this distance. That's enough bandwidth to pass your 100PB in 20 minutes, over a single strand of glass fiber.
Yes, but NEC sent raw bits (probably just pseudorandom data) over a single length of fiber, that's just the raw fiber throughput. This experiment ran over a live network, so: multiple lengths of fiber, optical amplifiers in between, add/drop multiplexers in between, then put Ethernet over it, IP routing between Ethernet segments, and _then_ terminate this on real machines transferring that data through memory to and from disk. The hardware they used is also commercially and currently available, while you'd probably be looking for a vendor that has a setup with 370 lasers that fire into a single fiber (as described in the article that Wikipedia used as a source for the NEC experimental results.)