For fiber? So I assume that they aren't going to be doing much digging, rather that they are going to string a few more lines alone already-existing paths.
>will make it possible to move data at speeds of 10 gigabits to 100 gigabits.
Wow.
In all seriousness: Kudos to whomever wrote the grant application. 5mil will keep people in work. But this project won't come anywhere near what is necessary to stream the data from 1% of the LHC's detectors. A private high-speed network is all well and good, but this isn't anything remarkable.
This article is so bad you can't even tell which grant out of many similar ones it probably is. About fifteen years ago, it was a problem for researchers of moving large data stores, and whether it's faster to do it with a network or with suitcases full of tapes. Who pays for the storage, where it's kept, and who is allowed to access it. These grants are usually denied, and so each group of researchers scrapes up their own little partial datastore and ships graduate students and postdocs back and forth from the uni to the Cern/DeSy/Fermilab/SLAC/wherever, sometimes with suitcases full of tapes on the return trips. I'm a little surprised that it's still a problem for them.
They talk about LHC, but the innovation there was using a different file system: GPFS (http://iopscience.iop.org/1742-6596/219/7/072030) which meant that data is sharded, managed by age and transparently cached intelligently
Are they instead talking about using replacing TCP with something more designed for bulk data transfer?
Well, if you read the very first sentence of the article:
A series of ultra-high-speed fiber-optic cables will weave a cluster of West Coast university laboratories and supercomputer centers into a network called the Pacific Research Platform as part of a five-year $5 million dollar grant from the National Science Foundation.
It doesn't sound that way to me. This network seems to be specifically for moving around research data among the institutions. Internet2 is essentially a playground to research and demonstrate ways to improve the internet.
Of course, the applications here are probably quite different -- this research grant may be more geared toward building a faster network to handle large amounts of streaming input.
> The challenge in moving large amounts of scientific data is that the open Internet is designed for transferring small amounts of data, like web pages
I'm sure the File Transfer Protocol can handle 20 petabyte file transfers. They're probably in 200GB tarballs or something most file systems can work with.
But even if you have 1 gigabyte per second upload and download, you might not want to wait the 2 years for the file transfer.
I think this network might be to shuttle data between remote databases and computing farms. For instance, if you have 20 petabytes of data in Tulsa and an agreement with CalPoly to crunch the data for you.
Unfortunately, due to net neutrality laws, this can not be connected to the Internet. If these laws did not exist, "super networks" such as this could be defined in software and spun up at a moment's notice like some aws boxes. I'm guessing that's why the price tag here seems so low. All the hardware is already installed and ready to go, this project is just to set up a network that uses it to its full capacity.
For fiber? So I assume that they aren't going to be doing much digging, rather that they are going to string a few more lines alone already-existing paths.
>will make it possible to move data at speeds of 10 gigabits to 100 gigabits.
Wow.
In all seriousness: Kudos to whomever wrote the grant application. 5mil will keep people in work. But this project won't come anywhere near what is necessary to stream the data from 1% of the LHC's detectors. A private high-speed network is all well and good, but this isn't anything remarkable.