The Hindu Business Line : New record in fast data transmission via Net

A RECORD speed in data transmission through the Internet2 backbone was announced at the recent Internet2 embers' Spring 2004 meeting in Arlington (USA).

The network link ran between Los Angeles and Geneva over approximately 11,000 km at an average speed of 6.25 gigabytes per second. This is roughly 10,000 times faster than a home broadband connection.Internet2 is a consortium of over 200 universities, which work with the industry and the government to develop next-gen technologies.

The contest, which began in 2000, is an open and ongoing exercise to evaluate the ability of researchers to build the highest-bandwidth, end-to-end Internet Protocol network.

According to researchers, members from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and the Geneva-based CERN used IPv4, the current system for Internet addressing, to set the record. The same team had previously reported a new benchmark of 4 gigabits per second over the same distance using IPv6, the next generation of Internet protocols.

Analysts said the development was significant in view of the needs of the research community, which needs high-capacity links to transfer large amounts of data compared to the average person who may not need this amount of bandwidth.

According to studies by the US Department of Energy, researchers in climatology, high-energy physics, bioinformatics, astrophysics and fusion energy will require networks in the terabit-per-second range within the next decade.

In certain cases, research on high-speed networks is gradually moving up to production settings. Currently, diverse groups are working on high-speed grids to connect research institutions and laboratories and enable scientists to share large volumes of data more efficiently.

For instance, CERN and its partners have already begun building a high-speed network called Large Hadron Collider (LHC) Computing Grid.