From: Hal Finney (hal@finney.org)
Date: Wed Jun 04 2003 - 21:12:56 MDT
Note, the Institute prefers to be called Caltech versus Cal Tech or
CAL TECH.
This was discussed on slashdot a couple of months ago,
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/03/22/2148241. I think the part
about "6,000 times the capacity of the ordinary broadband links" was
along the lines of "6,000 times finer than a human hair" or "6,000 times
heavier than a battleship", or "6,000 times farther than the distance from
New York to Los Angeles." In other words, a comparison to something that
users might be familiar with. In this case, I think they were trying to
compare the bandwidth of this link versus an ordinary broadband connection
that a typical user might have used. Their grammar kind of got away
from them and the sentence didn't quite work, but that's my guess.
http://pr.caltech.edu/media/Press_Releases/PR12356.html writes:
The protocol is called FAST, standing for Fast Active queue management
Scalable Transmission Control Protocol (TCP). The researchers have
achieved a speed of 8,609 megabits per second (Mbps) by using 10
simultaneous flows of data over routed paths, the largest aggregate
throughput ever accomplished in such a configuration. More importantly,
the FAST protocol sustained this speed using standard packet size,
stably over an extended period on shared networks in the presence of
background traffic, making it adaptable for deployment on the world's
high-speed production networks.
The experiment was performed last November during the Supercomputing
Conference in Baltimore, by a team from Caltech and the Stanford Linear
Accelerator Center (SLAC), working in partnership with the European
Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), and the organizations DataTAG,
StarLight, TeraGrid, Cisco, and Level(3).
It sounds like they actually sent data from California to Geneva
across the plain old Internet, at 8.6 Gbits per second. And this was
contending with all the MP3s and Britney Spears photos and everything
else. So that's pretty good. Of course, probably the toughest part is
getting an 8.6 Gbit connection to the Internet at both ends!
Hal
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Jun 04 2003 - 21:25:51 MDT