Superfast internet may replace world wide web

Mon Apr 7 18:07:59 UTC 2008

On Apr 7, 2008, at 1:00 PM, Kevin Oberman wrote:

>> Date: Mon, 7 Apr 2008 20:21:26 +0530
>> From: "Glen Kent" <glen.kent at gmail.com>
>> Sender: owner-nanog at merit.edu
>>
>>
>> says the solemn headline of Telegraph.
>>
>> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2008/04/06/ninternet106.xml
>>
>> Also related to this one, here:
>>
>> "Web could collapse as video demand soars"
>> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2008/04/07/nweb107.xml
>>
>> .. and we in Nanog are still discussing IPv6! ;-)
>>
>
> Sigh. Never let a clueless writer put up a story as technically  
> complex
> as this. He clearly does not know the difference between the web  
> (which
> WAS invented at CERN) and the Internet (which was not). His  
> confusion on
> this and other details leads to a story which has little or nothing to
> say.
>
> 1. The grid was NOT invented at CERN, although CERN/LHC people were
> involved.
>
> 2. Aside from being the a huge physics experiment, it is also a huge
> network experiment. We will be carrying many gigabits of data from  
> CERN
> to FermiLab and Brookhaven as well as from those facilities to physics
> researcher all over the world. By 2011 we may be seeing close to 100
> Gbps 24/7 for months at a time. And that is just data from CERN to the
> US. They will be sending data to many other countries. (OK, there are
> some short pauses for calibration.)
>
> 3. This will all be over the Internet, though much will utilize
> dedicated lines purchased/leased just for this. But it's still TCP/IP
> and UDP (mostly the former) and mostly using traditional P2P  
> techniques
> to get adequate performance over links with RTTs in excess of 200 ms.
>
> It is true that the problems faced by CERN are similar to those  
> faced by
> CDNs streaming video, but it is different in that this data is NOT
> streamed. You can't take the chance that the packet with the Higgs  
> Boson
> waving "hello" is dropped.

I would actually disagree with that, _IF_ your SNR is limited by your  
bit rate.

In VLBI (where the SNR _IS_ limited by the bit rate) it is more  
efficient to send more
(new) data than to repeat old data that gets lost.

Having talked to particle physicists here who feel that they are in  
the same regime, I
would be curious as to whether or not CERN has done the math on
this, and with what result.

Regards
Marshall

>
>
> Since almost of the traffic is passing over dedicated links,  
> congestion
> due to aggregation, the big issue with streaming video, is simply  
> not an
> issue. We want to move as much data in a single "stream" as you can
> convince TCP to allow.
>
> So the things learned from the LHC network experiment may well help
> improve the Internet and help with things like video distribution, the
> grid is NOT going to replace the web, let alone the Internet.
> -- 
> R. Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer
> Energy Sciences Network (ESnet)
> Ernest O. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab)
> E-mail: oberman at es.net			Phone: +1 510 486-8634
> Key fingerprint:059B 2DDF 031C 9BA3 14A4  EADA 927D EBB3 987B 3751