RE: CAL TECH's Superfast TCP

From: Hal Finney (hal@finney.org)
Date: Wed Jun 04 2003 - 21:12:56 MDT

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    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



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