this is from a post on the realnetwork thread discussing some breakthroughs in networtk speed and where that leads us....
Very intersted in establishing a major seagate position but wondering what some of you may think here about there development efforts and new products.
Gigabit per second delivered to desktop
The new software would make real-time, high-quality video routine
Computer scientists in the US have broken one gigabit per second data transfer to
desktop computers in a local area network (LAN).
This is 20,000 times faster than communication through a telephone modem and
was achieved using TCP/IP, the communications standard for the Internet.
Transferring a billion bits per second would mean, for example, that watching
real-time high-quality video would be routine. However, one difficulty yet to be
overcome is that the speed of writing to a computer's hard disk is still relatively
slow, often only 40 megabytes per second.
Rewriting the rules
Gigabit networks and network cards can be bought now but do not function at
these speeds. However, by re-writing software, the team at Duke University, US,
have shown these speeds are possible.
The increased data transfer speed will only benefit users if hardware keeps up
"It's the first demonstration on public record of TCP/IP running faster than a
gigabit per second, end-to-end, one network workstation to another," said one of
the team, Jeff Chase, at Duke University.
"What we have done is provide the software support that's needed to allow others
to achieve similar speeds on other networks that will arrive in the future," he
added.
The backbones of current LANs can run at a gigabit per second but the data
transfer to a desktop computer connected to the LAN is limited by the network
card, usually 10 or 100 megabits per second.
Experimental stage
The Duke LAN is experimental and operates within a small space but Professor
Chase believes the techniques developed there could eventually help computer
users obtain more efficient access to larger scale networks, including a future
version of the Internet.
It might also mean that standard TCP/IP type software could be used for such
cutting edge applications as wiring together individual desktop computers into a
massively parallel supercomputer.
"What we've done is narrow the gap between standard TCP/IP communications
that everybody loves and knows how to use and has the software to use and these
more cutting edge technologies that are harder to use and difficult for people to
program," said Professor Chase.
"Over decades a lot of very smart people have done a lot of work trying to write
the software that allows TCP communications at very high speeds. In some sense,
what we have done really is show that they got it right." he added.
Streamlined software
The Duke team achieved speeds of 1.147 billion bits a second on a special
high-speed Myrinet LAN with new Myrinet network cards.
They did this by streamlining the software operations which both the send and
receive data. The modifications included:
"zero-copy data movement" which circumvents the time-consuming step of
reading data from one area of computer network memory and writing it into
another,
"scatter/gather input/output," allows data in various locations of computer memory
to be rounded up and sent together as large messages.
"adaptive message pipelining," which schedules the movement of data between the
network and an individual computer's memory to deliver high performance. The
Duke group has filed for a patent for this,
By special agreement with Myricom, the group also made changes to the
"firmware" codes in network cards that programmers ordinarily cannot alter.
Post New • Post Reply
|
