High-speed academic networks and the future of the Internet (Internet 2) By John Timmer
Building and using dedicated networks As we recently reported, the Internet's backbone should be able to scale to handle the sheer volume of traffic that it's expected to face in the foreseeable future. But a number of factors complicate any analysis based on the simple volume figures. Many services, such as VoIP and streaming video, create expectations of guaranteed bandwidth that may be tough to maintain in the face of vast volumes of spam and P2P traffic; everything may get there, but not necessarily when we'd like it to. Meanwhile, problems with the "last mile" networks can obscure the capacity of the network backbone. The academic world has faced similar issues for a while, and will soon be facing a flood of data from the biggest news in physics, the activation of the Large Hadron Collider. The data gathered at the LHC, located at CERN outside of Geneva, will be distributed to a worldwide grid of computer clusters for analysis, which will require sustained transfers well in excess of 10 Gigabits per second. To get a sense of how the academic world is solving its networking needs and what that might mean for the future of general networking, we spoke with executives at Internet2 and the European network provider DANTE. more... http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/future-internet.ars _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
