| CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, and the California Institute of Technology Caltech have recently set a new Internet2 land speed record using the next-generation Internet protocol IPv6. The team sustained a single stream Transfer Control Protocol (TCP) rate of 983Mbit/s for more than one hour between CERN in Switzerland and Chicago, USA, a distance of more than 7,000km. This performance overcomes two important challenges: IPv6 forwarding at Gbit/s speeds, and high-speed TCP performance across high-bandwidth/latency networks.
This latest record by CERN and Caltech is a further step in an ongoing R&D; programme to develop high-speed global networks as the foundation of next generation data-intensive Grids. Caltech and CERN also hold the current Internet2 land speed record in the IPv4 class, where IPv4 is the traditional Internet protocol that carries 90% of the world�s network traffic today. In collaboration with the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), Los Alamos National Laboratory, USA, and the companies Cisco Systems, Level 3, and Intel, the team transferred one Terabite of data across 10,037km in less than one hour, from Sunnyvale, California, USA, to Geneva, Switzerland. This corresponds to a sustained TCP rate of 2.38Gbit/s for more than one hour. Multi-gigabit-per-second IPv4 and IPv6 end-to-end network performance will lead to new research and business models. People will be able to form "virtual organisations" of planetary scale, sharing in a flexible way their collective computing and data resources. In particular, this is vital for projects on the frontiers of science and engineering, projects such as particle physics, astronomy, bio-informatics, global climate modelling, and seismology.
�These new records establish the feasibility of transferring very large amounts of data, using a single TCP/IP stream rather than multiple streams as a quick fix to TCP/IP�s congestion avoidance algorithms. I am optimistic that the various research groups working on this issue will now quickly release new TCP/IP stacks, having much better resilience to packet losses on long-distance multi-gigabit-per-second paths, thus allowing similar or even better records to be established across shared Internet backbones�, commented .Mr Olivier Martin, head of external networking at CERN and manager of the DataTAG. The DataTAG is a project co-funded by the European Union, the US Department of Energy, and the National Science Foundation. It is led by CERN together with four other European leading research agencies. The DataTAG project is very closely associated with the European Union DataGrid project, the largest grid project in Europe also led by CERN.
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