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)
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I remember being opposed to 28.8 modems cause the ANSI art from bbs's would scroll by too fast, it just wasnt the same without watching a menu draw on screen
course now I use a machine routine to force my apple II to do 115,200 and thinking this seems a bit sluggish
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old (Score:2)
Heh, I remember when I was younger connecting to 300 baud modems with my 2400 baud modem and thinking "man that's slow, it must be very old!" lol
My god (Score:1, Funny)
It's full of porn!
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I was just about to ask if that's enough to stream hi-def 8K uncompressed, live-action uber-porn!? >;-)
Just a matter of Cost (Score:3, Interesting)
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Don't forget equipment management, billing, HR, insurance, and everything else it takes to keep your employees that actually install, maintain and upgrade that equipment around. Last I checked, people were still required and they are, by far, the most expensive part of our data center.
The point (Score:2)
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Re:The point (Score:4, Interesting)
I was taking a more general application of "what's the point?" The first connection to what would become the Internet was made between UCLA and SRI in Menlo Park, CA after all. That was a big deal for them, but a bigger deal for us. What the point of that was is rather subjective.
100PB seems like a lot of data today - 3,000 times the 3TB storage available in a standard PC. But I am so old I wear an onion on my belt, as was the fashion in my day. 1/3000th of that 3TB is 1GB. I can remember when to have 1GB of storage in your PC was an undreamt of wealth of storage richness: a bottomless well that might never be filled. Hell, I can remember a day when 3TB of digital info storage was more storage than there was - everywhere on Earth. In fact in my early days there was talk of a terabyte being the sum of human knowledge (silly, I know). It's reasonable to expect that when that much more time has passed again, 100PB will not be a big deal either.
So now we carry around a 1TB 2.5" USB drive in our shirt pocket like it's no big deal. And when guys like this do things like this we talk about what it means to them - and that's fine. But there is a larger story, like there was a larger story at UCLA - and that is "what does this mean to the rest of us?"
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.
The LA Metro area is about 15 million people, or 3 million homes. To deliver 1Gbps to a reasonable half of 3 million homes and mesh it out for global distribution is going to require a lot of these links. The aggregate demand would probably be under 1% of peak potential of 3,000 Tbps or about 30Tbps. 100 times the bandwidth of this link. Using CDNs(*) - particularly for YouTube, CableTV, the usual porn suspects and BitTorrent you could diminish the need for wider bandwidth considerably but you still need a wide pipe to the outside world. And all the Internet servers in the world would need to be updated to support the crushing demand with higher performance, SSD storage and the like. And that's great for the economy, and it's just LA.
These innovations are neat, but they're neater still when they come home to all of us.
TL;DR: Get off my lawn.
/(*) Define CDN: A CDN, or Content Delivery Network [wikipedia.org] is a facility for moving high bandwidth, high demand or high transaction content closer to a nexus of consumers. An example would be Netflix, which delivers streaming video content to 21 million subscribers, comprising by some estimates a full third of Internet traffic. Netflix provides for free to Internet providers BackBlaze boxes [gigaom.com] that move Netflix content closer to the end user, reducing backbone usage. Similar boxes are provided by advertising networks and other content providers.
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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
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(same AC as above)
That's true, but that ideal will break sooner than you'd like unless you're going to custom-design and build all your equipment yourself, which at that level is pretty tough, even for a company like Google. That equipment is not comparable to what you can get in your local computer shop, only very few companies worldwide can produce all devices you need from end to end.
- After some 160km at most you're going to need amplification, which limits the wavelengths you can use (there are
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Kansas City is already being wired with 1Gbps dedicated connections in people's homes. A fiber line runs from the home to a "fiber hut" (a room sized switch or router) and the fiber hut is placed on the Internet backbone, with no aggregation in between. I saw synchronous 900Mbit(ish) bandwidth tests results on a screen at Google Fiber Space. Even Verizon's and AT&T's 100Gbps network backbones are going to fill up pretty fast once this rolls out to more customers and Google starts installing for their
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Google has the backbone fiber to do this, and the tech to make it work. Nobody else does. And they do, in fact, leverage non-standard tech to move their bits over their own fiber. They design their own switches, switch links and so on and they leverage emerging technologies like this. Just like they design their own servers, and go direct to China for motherboards and Intel for processors, they're not paying $1300 for a 10Gbps SFP+ LR GBIC.
They bought this fiber for pennies on the dollar it cost to lay
So at home... (Score:3, Informative)
I could blow thru my bandwidth cap in just under a second.
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meanwhile comcast offers me 15mbit at 60 bucks a month
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.
Units (Score:1)
What's the equivalent speed measured in Library of Congresses?
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339 Gb/s? (Score:1)
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meh, no, we only have 100 mbit/s standard, with expiriments being done on 1 gbit/s
339G over a 100G would be news (Score:1)
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It's good to know that 339 gigabits per second (53GB/s) is equal to 187Gbps and that's hows much iz gonna need next time I downloads 200000 Bluray films fore sundown. But how godamn many rods of horsepower am I'm gonna need to run this bastard. Them hamster gots to eat.
Yeehaw, Iz ciphering real good now.
Of course, even a dumb ole country boy knows that if the packets aren't routed, it's not fair to call it internet. I'll just chalk that up to sensationalist reporting by slashdot morons.
Invalid unit of measure... (Score:1)
Does this score points with delinquent juveniles? It's a counterproductive addition that makes the whole posting appear specious with respect to academic and scientific relevance.
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And the MPAA sued both universities for ONE BILLION DOLLARS, claiming the "potential to pirate 11.25 DVDs per second".
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Do you always stink that bad or is it only because you pooped your pants? Sorry to stoop to your level of trolling, but the summary at least gives both, the value in a reproducible measurement and as an analogy that relays how impressive the feat was. Why did you add your first sentence? At least I can blame you for mine.
Comcast and CenturyLink (Score:2)
Comcast and CenturyLink would still block you after using more than 250 gigs of bandwidth.
In the future "unlimited" will mean "just a second".
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Comcast and CenturyLink would still block you after using more than 250 gigs of bandwidth.
In the future "unlimited" will mean "just a second".
Australian so much loved here 100Mbit NBN has a 40GB quota :D Thats less than an hour full throttle.
Scientific computing (Score:3)
It is because (Score:2)
"It is because of these networks that we can discover new particles"
holy shit batman, I thought it was because of the "Large Hadron Collider", ok then +1 to you internet
That math is wonky (Score:2, Interesting)
How is 339 gigabits per second equal to 53 gigabytes per second?
How is 187 gigabits per second equal to 29 gigabytes per second?
How is 96 gigabits per second equal to 15 gigabytes per second?
Glad to hear they're using 6.4 bits per byte. Next week they'll drop down to 2 bits per byte and push out another press release.
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A severe case of chafing.
LHC data sets, eat your heart out (Score:2)
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Seriously, no one has any idea how the fuck we're going to analyze all the data quite yet. A completely untrained n00b beats the pants off of any image classifying algorithm hands down, but how do you classify billions of objects that way?
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foxconn. Duh
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Facebook analyzes and stores roughly 500 TB a day (Apache web logs), just to know how their service is being used. I know it's quite an order of magnitude easier to analyze, but efficient cluster and distributed computing does wonders. Telescope data would fit the paradigm quite well, probably even playing nicely with the uber-simple mapreduce framework.
Google figured out how to get untrained n00bs to classify images. They invented the Google Image Labeler game. IIRC, you would be paired up with someone
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Earlier this year, Gizmodo reported that the LHC generates a petabyte of data every second. Actually, that's just one of the two primary experiments.
http://us.gizmodo.com/5914548/the-large-hadron-collider-throws-away-more-data-than-it-stores [gizmodo.com]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mgXNgD3JFU [youtube.com]
The have to preprocess the raw data through a filter that determines if the collision is interesting or not. Then they further parse that down and only store a tiny fraction of the raw data generated every day. If they were able
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
That limit doesn't really have to do with offsite transfer speed, but just about local speed of getting it onto a disk a few meters away from the machine. Faster computers and storage technology is needed for that instead of faster long distance communication (unless a particular advance in the latter helps with dedicated lines over very short distances relatively speaking). Fast long distance operations improve the rate at which researchers can query and run tests on the large data set instead.
Also, the
the big slurp (Score:2)
Surprises me they chose an island as the the northern terminus. I'm suspecting the undersea observation network has something to do with it.
OS, application? (Score:3)
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I'd imagine they are counting the raw network to RAM via DMA speed, not the speed at which the CPU can interpret the data. The disk transfer rate speed is a better indication of that, although presumably the disk DMAs the data into RAM and then the NIC DMAs it out again so the CPU is relatively unloaded.
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DMA will not solve all your problems. If you use the POSIX API, for instance, you will call read(2) or recv(2) to get data in a buffer you provide. You do not know in advance the size of the data chunk, and if your buffer is to small, data ought to be waiting in kernel for you to retrieve it. Same problem if you call read(2) after the data arrived.
In both cases you must have a copy between kernel and userland, regardless of how smart the implementation is with DMA
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In South Korea (Score:2)
Why is this news?
In South Korea anyone can get 350Gbps fibre to their home for less than $50/month!
To be a speed record (Score:2)
Doesn't it have to be both ways?
(Like with land water and air soeed records...
New 339 gbps/sec accounts available (Score:1)
1 GB data cap and a cost of 399.99/month and you have to sign up for a trillion years ....
who cares its does none of us any good with the restrictive long term copyright crap...
it snot like anyone on the net is gonna be needing bandwidth unless your pirating right?
Caution please (Score:2)
And just today (Score:1)
UTMA [utma.com]
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I think tape drives still wins (LTO 5 is 1.5TB uncompressed, the new LTO 6 is 2.5TB)
Internet vs Wagon-net (Score:1)
With a quick search, I found a Ford Flex listed with 83.2 cubic feet of space and the dimensions of an LTO cartridge. 83.2 ft^3/((102 x 105.4 x 21.5) mm^3)=10192 tape cartridges, nearly 25 PB using LTO 6 w/o compression. Google says the drive between the colleges is 19 hours and 48 minutes. Neglecting copy times, it works out to about 366 GB/s, more than 8x the speed.
In reality, you can stack tapes in the passenger seat, but if you want to have any hope of sorting the tapes back out, you'll need to pack
Data (Score:2)
My big question that the article seems a bit light on, is other than the "size" of the data, they make no mention of what kind of data was used.
It's all very well and good if they used a randomized contents of a HD, then just replicated it. It is something else entirely if they used very specialized data for this particular test.
i.e. that speed works very well but only if the data consists of all 1's.
Also some pretty limited applications for this technology at present unless computers get faster, and storag
There is also Next Generation Sequencing (Score:1)
"Or around 200,000 Blu-ray movie rips..." (Score:1)
"Conventional (pre-BD-XL) Blu-ray Discs contain 25 GB per layer, with dual layer discs (50 GB) being the industry standard for feature-length video discs."
Hyperbole is good but should not be at the expense of the truth.