Eric Martin
join:2005-06-19
66308 |  Why
Why fund this exclusive network ???
Let them pay for it themselves.
I heard students are using it for piracy.
Kind of stupid.
The dollars should go to a new network everyone can use. |
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Aleck79
join:2003-07-23
College Station, TX
 ·Grande Communicati..
| said by »internet2.edu/about/ :
About Internet2®
Internet2 is a consortium being led by 207 universities working in partnership with industry and government to develop and deploy advanced network applications and technologies, accelerating the creation of tomorrow's Internet. Internet2 is recreating the partnership among academia, industry and government that fostered today´s Internet in its infancy. The primary goals of Internet2 are to:
* Create a leading edge network capability for the national research community
* Enable revolutionary Internet applications
* Ensure the rapid transfer of new network services and applications to the broader Internet community.
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cluth
join:2004-01-06
Anchorage, AK
·GCI.net
| reply to Eric Martin
Believe it or not, most of the bandwidth that travels over the Abilene network (Internet2 is actually the name of the consortium; the network itself is Abilene) actually is related to research.
I looked all through my technology bookmarks and couldn't find it, but I once visited a Web site that showed a group of researchers at a university in Southern California interacting in real-time with scanners at another university somewhere in the Midwest. The data were shown on a wall-sized cluster of Apple 30" Cinema Displays. Again, I forget the specifics, but we're talking about terabytes of data flowing. I know that up here in Alaska, the University of Alaska Fairbanks runs the Arctic Region Supercomputing Center. It's connected to Abilene via the Pacific Northwest GigaPop (the university doesn't have full 10Gbps speeds up here yet--I believe it's a couple of OC-3s, although I may have read that they upped it to an OC-12). The connection is supposedly quite busy with data being submitted and retrieved from the center.
I'm a little unclear with this news story: the Abilene core network is already at 10Gbps and has been for almost three years now. Is it a misprint and the network's actually heading for 100Gbps (unlikely), or are they working on connecting each university to the core network at 10Gbps? Most universities aren't at full 10Gbps connectivity yet--for example, I believe UC Berkeley's connection to CalREN (which provides connectivity to Abilene) is an OC-12 (622Mbps), and their connection to CENIC, which provides their commodity Internet connectivity, is two OC-3s (310Mbps). That's a long way short of 10Gbps, and they're a major research institution. |
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cluth
join:2004-01-06
Anchorage, AK | Just reread the news story, and it is a misprint: the quote from the AP in the tiny print does specify that they're aiming for 100Gbps (while the news bite itself says 10Gbps). As I said, they've been at 10Gbps for three years now. |
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cluth
join:2004-01-06
Anchorage, AK
·GCI.net
| reply to Aleck79
Sorry for the multiple posts, but I just read something in the AP story that illustrates this:
quote:
Van Houweling said the upgrade is driven by new research needs. For example, astronomers are trying to link radio telescopes around the world, pooling data so they function as one. Van Houweling said the added capacity can also allow U.S. scientists to fully use the world's largest particle physics collider being built outside Geneva.
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