Scientists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) have set a new Internet2 land speed record using the next-generation Internet protocol IPv6. The team sustained a single stream TCP rate of 983 megabits per second for more than one hour between the CERN facility in Geneva and Chicago, a distance of more than 7,000 kilometers. This is equivalent to transferring a full CD in 5.6 seconds.
The performance is remarkable because it overcomes two important challenges:
· IPv6 forwarding at Gigabit-per-second speeds · High-speed TCP performance across high bandwidth/latency networks.
This major step towards demonstrating how effectively IPv6 can be used should encourage scientists and engineers in many sectors of society to deploy the next-generation Internet protocol, the Caltech researchers say.
This latest record by Caltech and CERN is a further step in an ongoing research-and-development program to develop high-speed global networks as the foundation of next generation data-intensive grids. Caltech and CERN also hold the current Internet2 land speed record in the IPv4 class, where IPv4 is the traditional Internet protocol that carries 90 percent of the world's network traffic today. In collaboration with the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), Los Alamos National Laboratory, and the companies Cisco Systems, Level 3, and Intel, the team transferred one terabyte of data across 10,037 kilometers in less than one hour, from Sunnyvale, California, to Geneva, Switzerland. This corresponds to a sustained TCP rate of 2.38 gigabits per second for more than one hour.
Multi-gigabit-per-second IPv4 and IPv6 end-to-end network performance will lead to new research and business models. People will be able to form "virtual organizations" of planetary scale, sharing in a flexible way their collective computing and data resources. In particular, this is vital for projects on the frontiers of science and engineering, projects such as particle physics, astronomy, bioinformatics, global climate modeling, and seismology.
Harvey Newman, professor of physics at Caltech, said, "This is a major milestone towards our dynamic vision of globally distributed analysis in data-intensive, next-generation high-energy physics (HEP) experiments. Terabyte-scale data transfers on demand, by hundreds of small groups and thousands of scientists and students spread around the world, is a basic element of this vision; one that our recent records show is realistic. IPv6, with its increased address space and security features is vital for the future of global networks, and especially for organizations such as ours, where scientists from all world regions are building computing clusters on an increasing scale, and where we use computers including wireless laptop and mobile devices in all aspects of our daily work.
"In the future, the use of IPv6 will allow us to avoid network address translations (NAT) that tend to impede the use of video-advanced technologies for real-time collaboration," Newman added. "These developments also will empower the broader research community to use peer-to-peer and other advanced grid architectures in support of their computationally intensive scientific goals."
Olivier Martin, head of external networking at CERN and manager of the DataTAG project said, "These new records clearly demonstrate the maturity of IPv6 protocols and the availability of suitable off-the-shelf commercial products. They also establish the feasibility of transferring very large amounts of data using a single TCP/IP stream rather than multiple streams as has been customarily done until now by most researchers as a quick fix to TCP/IP's congestion avoidance algorithms. I am optimistic that the various research groups working on this issue will now quickly release new TCP/IP stacks having much better resilience to packet losses on long-distance multi-gigabit-per-second paths, thus allowing similar or even better records to be established across shared Internet backbones."
The team used the optical networking capabilities of the LHCnet, DataTAG, and StarLight and gratefully acknowledges support from the DataTAG project sponsored by the European Commission (EU Grant IST-2001-32459), the DOE Office of Science, High Energy and Nuclear Physics Division (DOE Grants DE-FG03-92-ER40701 and DE-FC02-01ER25459), and the National Science Foundation (Grants ANI 9730202, ANI-0230967, and PHY-0122557).
About the California Institute of Technology (Caltech):
With an outstanding faculty, including four Nobel laureates, and such off-campus facilities as Palomar Observatory, and the W. M. Keck Observatory, the California Institute of Technology is one of the world's major research centers. The Institute also conducts instruction in science and engineering for a student body of approximately 900 undergraduates and 1,000 graduate students who maintain a high level of scholarship and intellectual achievement. Caltech's 124-acre campus is situated in Pasadena, California, a city of 135,000 at the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains, approximately 30 miles inland from the Pacific Ocean and 10 miles northeast of the Los Angeles Civic Center. Caltech is an independent, privately supported university, and is not affiliated with either the University of California system or the California State Polytechnic universities. More information is available at http://www.caltech.edu.
About CERN:
CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, has its headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland. At present, its member states are Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. Israel, Japan, the Russian Federation, the United States of America, Turkey, the European Commission, and UNESCO have observer status. For more information, see http://www.cern.ch.
About the European Union DataTAG project:
The DataTAG is a project co-funded by the European Union, the U.S. Department of Energy, and the National Science Foundation. It is led by CERN together with four other partners. The project brings together the following European leading research agencies: Italy's Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN), France's Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique (INRIA), the UK's Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council (PPARC), and Holland's University of Amsterdam (UvA). The DataTAG project is very closely associated with the European Union DataGrid project, the largest grid project in Europe also led by CERN. For more information, see http://www.datatag.org.
