cluth
join:2004-01-06
Anchorage, AK
| reply to Eric Martin
Re: Why
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. |
