Scientists at the California Institute of Technology and the European Organization for Nuclear Research set a new land-speed record for Internet2 boosting up to 859 gigabytes of data in less than 17 minutes. The average data rate was measured at 6.63 gigabits per second between CERN's facility in Geneva, Switzerland and Caltech in Pasadena, Calif., a distance of more than 15,766 kilometers, or approximately 9,800 miles.

Internet2 is a second-generation network serving universities and research institutes.

Researchers aren't the only ones excited about blazing data speeds. This record speed of 6.63Gbps is equivalent to transferring a full-length DVD movie in four seconds. There are uses in astronomy, bioinformatics, global climate modeling and seismology, as well as commercial applications from entertainment to oil and gas exploration.

Hah, Internet2, how orgional.

7gig a SECOND? Thats faster than a low-latency A64 memory array - and thats talking about latencies of about 40ms and trace lengths of 3cms. That must be one hell of a set up to transmit/receieve the data that fast. More interestingly I would like to see the HDD array for writing 7gig a second. I believe Raptors on a decent SATA controller manage 50meg/sec.....

Steg

Very good point, I didnt think about it in that aspect.

Raptors will do a little over 100 Mbps when striped with raid 0.

forget about the hdd write speed, they probably just had TONS of memory and a gargatuan RAM drive. this is incredible though. I would love to drool over the hardware and (assumed) fibre optics they used for this.

Aye, tons of RAM....to the tune of 300gig? But, hell, how many channels and how fast does your RAM need to be to get sustained writes of 7gig a second?

Steg

P.S. DUH! We have missed something obvious here - this artical says nothing about 7 gigabytes a second - its claims So thats *does some complicated number crunching* is only 848.64 meg a second - which is a MUCH more realistic figure....but still damn fast.

Haha gigabits

and btw, I dont think TONS=3TB

3TBs of RAM? I would class that as tons

3,000gbs? thats a few tons of tons..

Tons of ram = 3gigs
Tons of ram for a sever = 50gigs

3,000 gigs? thats unheard of :P

Noone said they actually sent a file across that link. A 10 line program can generate a set of data that can be sent over the network and a similar 10 line program can verify that data at the other end.

So memory or storage wise the technology doesn't have to be that utopical.

Nothing really extraordinary here, just a fast backbone network

Bah, its all a play on words :P

Well .. considering the majority of the internet(1) is based over ATM (sdh) technology which has a theoretical transfer limit of just over 155 meg per second, a sustained rate of 842Mb / second is quite literally astounding...

622 Mbit ATM (OC-12) is nothing special. And technically you can run ATM over OC-192 (10Gbit/s).