CORPORATE NEWS:
CERN and Caltech join forces to smash Internet speed record
CERN, the European Laboratory for particle physics, one of the world's most prestigious centres for fundamental research, and Caltech (California Institute of Technology), USA, one of the world's major research centres, have recently received an award for transferring over a Terabite of data across 7,000km of network at 5.44Gbit/s, smashing the old record of 2.38Gbit/s achieved in February 2003 between CERN in Geneva and Sunnyvale in California by a Caltech, CERN, Los Alamos National Laboratory and Stanford Linear Accelerator Center team.
The international CERN-Caltech team set this new Internet2® land speed record on 1 October 2003 (refer to EuroWire N°34) by transferring 1.1Tbit of data in less than 30 minutes, corresponding to 38,420.54 petabit-metres per second. The average rate of 5.44Gbit/s is more than 20,000 times faster than a typical home broadband connection. The award has been made to Olivier Martin of CERN and Harvey Newman of Caltech. "This new record marks another major milestone towards our final goal of abolishing distances and to enable more efficient world-wide scientific collaboration", commented Mr Olivier Martin, head of external networking at CERN and manager of the European Union DataTAG project. "The record further proves that it is no longer a dream to replicate terabites of data around the globe routinely and in a timely manner”. Mr Harvey Newman, head of the Caltech team, added: “We have now reached the point where servers side by side have the same TCP performance as servers separated by 10,000km. We also localised the current bottleneck to the I/O capability of the end-systems, and we expect that systems matching the full speed of a 10Gbit/s link will be commonplace in the relatively near future”.
The new record was set through the efforts of the DataTAG (a European Union funded project to create a large-scale intercontinental test bed for data-intensive grids) and FAST (a Caltech led project to develop robust and stable ultrascale networking), with major sponsorship from Cisco Systems, the European Union, HP, Intel, Juniper, Level 3 Communications, T-Systems, the US National Science Foundation, and the US Department of Energy.
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