Physicists Set Record for Network Data Transfer

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A group of scientists and researchers, led by a team from the California Institute of Technology, have set a new data transfer world record. While I appreciate them trying to use layman terms when explaining how much data can be transferred at 186Gbps, I think it is high time we started using a measurement most of us can instantly comprehend...like Pm² (porn movies per minute). ;)

At the SuperComputing 2011 (SC11) conference in Seattle during mid-November, the international team transferred data in opposite directions at a combined rate of 186 gigabits per second (Gbps) in a wide-area network circuit. The rate is equivalent to moving two million gigabytes per day, fast enough to transfer nearly 100,000 full Blu-ray disks—each with a complete movie and all the extras—in a day.
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finally, tired of searching online to watch it, now i can just save it for later views.
 
"fast enough to transfer nearly 100,000 full Blu-ray disks—each with a complete movie and all the extras—in a day"

And at once, all MPAA Employees gasped at once and tears of pain filled their eyes.
 
Lets see 186 Gbps would with AT&T's pricing scheme would put that into the 180,000th tier of pricing, at a net monthly cost of $1.8 billion.
 
Porn Per Minute *SQUARED* - that means double the porn you thought you could get initially! Hell I'd be happy with 5 Mbps instead of the 700 Kbps cap I have now.
 
ny_pcthe said:
who the hell but liars, measures in bits anymore? What BS! :rolleyes:
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lol, they're not lying. sure, it's annoying--like saying it would take 1.5061 quadrillion pennies to pay off the U.S. debt--but bps is pretty standard.
 
Steve said:
A group of scientists and researchers, led by a team from the California Institute of Technology, have set a new data transfer world record. While I appreciate them trying to use layman terms when explaining how much data can be transferred at 186Gbps, I think it is high time we started using a measurement most of us can instantly comprehend...like Pm² (porn movies per minute). ;)
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You should modify that to LT/S, because really, everyone on the internet is just downaloding linux torrents....lots and lots of linux....
 
ny_pcthe said:
who the hell but liars, measures in bits anymore? What BS! :rolleyes:
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Yeah, almost all network transfers are measured in bits.
It's been this way since the 70's and isn't going to change any time soon. ;)
 
This is impressive speed. We're doing 40 Gbps in the lab at work and that's pretty damn blazing fast.

Now who wants this multi-Gbps speed to happen wirelessly? :cool:
 
beowulf7 said:
This is impressive speed. We're doing 40 Gbps in the lab at work and that's pretty damn blazing fast.

Now who wants this multi-Gbps speed to happen wirelessly? :cool:
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Oh it's already doable. Has been for a long time.

Of course, at the consequence of hospitalization and/or death. :D
 
ny_pcthe said:
who the hell but liars, measures in bits anymore? What BS! :rolleyes:
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Broadband companies so they can say "hey you are getting 20mb/s speed!!!" and people go ":eek: i'm getting 20 megebytes a second!"... instead of selling it at 2.5... It's a free way of making your speed seem 8 times more. Who cares if it's misleading to the vast majority of people? :p
 
DeathPrincess said:
Broadband companies so they can say "hey you are getting 20mb/s speed!!!" and people go ":eek: i'm getting 20 megebytes a second!"... instead of selling it at 2.5... It's a free way of making your speed seem 8 times more. Who cares if it's misleading to the vast majority of people? :p
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Again there is no misleading, this is how communication speeds are determined, since all the way back in the early days of modems and BAUD rates.
 
My point exactly! and network companies still use it for the same reason, bragging rights. Mines bigger than yours! Its 16 cm! .......................lol:D
 
but its no longer relevant! With the speeds available what does it mean to anyone to measure in bit? Yes a geek thinks its great but joe average can't tell a bit from a byte and so it has become very misleading!
 
So we could potentially hit AT&T's bandwidth cap in a little over 6 seconds or Comcast's cap in a little over 10 seconds.

Also, how much DDoS'ing could they pull off to troll each other?
 
NoOther said:
Again there is no misleading, this is how communication speeds are determined, since all the way back in the early days of modems and BAUD rates.
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It IS misleading, as the average person has absolutely no clue what a "megabit" is, but they will fairly likely know what a megabyte is. When selling something to the general population it's kind of common decency to talk to them in terms they understand more make some effort to educate them otherwise, instead of often purposefully hiding or obfuscating it. Many adverts for internet providers I have seen, just use the term "20 meg" connections, or 56.6k etc. How is that not purposefully misleading or continuing to hide the true meaning? There is no clarification as to if this is megabits or megabytes, the same with HDDs in "1000gb" TBs etc. Ask most people and they will think their connection is measured in megabytes/kilobytes and their 1TB HDDs are 1024gbs. But which company is suddenly going to sell something at 1/8th of the "true" speed.
 
DeathPrincess said:
It IS misleading, as the average person has absolutely no clue what a "megabit" is, but they will fairly likely know what a megabyte is. When selling something to the general population it's kind of common decency to talk to them in terms they understand more make some effort to educate them otherwise, instead of often purposefully hiding or obfuscating it. Many adverts for internet providers I have seen, just use the term "20 meg" connections, or 56.6k etc. How is that not purposefully misleading or continuing to hide the true meaning? There is no clarification as to if this is megabits or megabytes, the same with HDDs in "1000gb" TBs etc. Ask most people and they will think their connection is measured in megabytes/kilobytes and their 1TB HDDs are 1024gbs. But which company is suddenly going to sell something at 1/8th of the "true" speed.
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If the average person doesn't know what a megabit is, then what does it matter whether they even know what a megabyte is. That reasoning makes no sense whatsoever. The general population doesn't understand communications at all, so what language would they understand? And there isn't any "less" involved here. If they told the consumer they were receiving megabytes, then you could say it is less, but they don't do that. Communication speeds have never been in megabytes. There is no "misleading" or "hiding" of the speeds. Every company is using the same measure, so how is there any "hiding" or "misleading"? Bits are the main component of information, using Bytes is actually the misleading part. If the general public doesn't understand, all they have to do is look up the information, it is available almost everywhere.
 
@dmin said:
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products...|mkwid_s1B9yfhnx_4609079678_432txu7stz1v01134

up to 322 Tbps
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That is how much bandwidth the backplane can handle and not the actual network transfer speeds. Basically what that allows is for you to connect as many switches and routers and firewalls up to the device as possible up to that 322 Tbps limit. Your network itself is still going to run at whatever your cable speed is, probably 1000Mbps or 100Mbps. Now you could hook a bunch of those up between devices but that requires a lot of extra cabling.

Think about it like this, you have CPUs and GPUs that can process tons of information at very high rates, but when they pass that information between each other they are limited by the speed of the bus that carries the information.

This technology essentially is helping creating a new bus or cable that can carry far more information, much faster, across long distances.
 
ny_pcthe said:
but its no longer relevant! With the speeds available what does it mean to anyone to measure in bit? Yes a geek thinks its great but joe average can't tell a bit from a byte and so it has become very misleading!
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Marketing plays a big part, but if you don't understand the difference, that's your loss within the industry. :rolleyes:
 
NoOther said:
If the average person doesn't know what a megabit is, then what does it matter whether they even know what a megabyte is. That reasoning makes no sense whatsoever. The general population doesn't understand communications at all, so what language would they understand? And there isn't any "less" involved here. If they told the consumer they were receiving megabytes, then you could say it is less, but they don't do that. Communication speeds have never been in megabytes. There is no "misleading" or "hiding" of the speeds. Every company is using the same measure, so how is there any "hiding" or "misleading"? Bits are the main component of information, using Bytes is actually the misleading part. If the general public doesn't understand, all they have to do is look up the information, it is available almost everywhere.
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How is using bytes misleading? :? Is it the part about when they advertise products as "1 TeraByte HDD" vs "1 TeraBit HDD", or.. ? And are you one of those people who use the ibi system?
 
aronesz said:
How is using bytes misleading? :? Is it the part about when they advertise products as "1 TeraByte HDD" vs "1 TeraBit HDD", or.. ? And are you one of those people who use the ibi system?
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Because network data transfers are not normally measured in bytes, that's why.

100Mbps = 12.5MB/s

Now tell me which one sounds more appealing to consumers and to the industry on a whole.
The majority of this is marketing, but 100Mbps is a lot easier for people to remember than 12.5MB/s imo.

I don't even know why this is an issue, all network data transfers have been measured this way for over 40 years now, this is nothing new. :confused:
 
Red Falcon said:
Because network data transfers are not normally measured in bytes, that's why.

100Mbps = 12.5MB/s

Now tell me which one sounds more appealing to consumers and to the industry on a whole.
The majority of this is marketing, but 100Mbps is a lot easier for people to remember than 12.5MB/s imo.

I don't even know why this is an issue, all network data transfers have been measured this way for over 40 years now, this is nothing new. :confused:
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Well, obviously bits sounds more appealing because it results in larger numbers and an easy-to-work-with base-10 usage (1/10/100/1000). Most people probably won't care about {8 bits = 1 byte, 1024 bytes = 1 kilobyte}.

But yes indeed, network has always been measured in bits. Storage in bytes.
 
aronesz said:
Well, obviously bits sounds more appealing because it results in larger numbers and an easy-to-work-with base-10 usage (1/10/100/1000). Most people probably won't care about {8 bits = 1 byte, 1024 bytes = 1 kilobyte}.

But yes indeed, network has always been measured in bits. Storage in bytes.
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And there lies the issue. Storage changed the measurement to use bytes, because bytes are easier to represent, and many memory and other technologies can work in bytes, but its not always the most accurate method. Too many times people try to apply the metric system with bytes, but it doesn't actually work that way. You have to do more calculations when using bytes rather than bits. Information itself is handled in terms of bits. So bits should be the proper way to define communication, and so they are.
 
mashie said:
Thay are not doing anything fancy tbh, just running networking kit with 100GbE interfaces. All it takes is a big pile of cash as the kit is stupidly expensive.
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Actually it is quite a big deal since first of all, only a few places develop 100GE interfaces, and second of all you still need medium capable of that transfer. Even in the link provided it explains the difficulty and how not all of the solutions even provide a clean 100Gbps connection. It isn't just a bunch of cables connected providing that bandwidth, its an optical solution and to actually achieve 100Gbps speeds there is a lot of processing that needs to take place in a very short period of time. It is not at all the same as just providing a bunch of bandwidth.
 
bigdogchris said:
So it's about 24 GB/s transfer speed. Not bad.
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Actually its about 21.6 GB/s. Remember 8bits to a Byte, 1024 Bytes to a KB, 1024 KB to MB, 1024 MB to GB.

186,000,000,000
/8
/1024
/1024
/1024
--------
21.65324985980987548828125
 
NoOther said:
Actually its about 21.6 GB/s. Remember 8bits to a Byte, 1024 Bytes to a KB, 1024 KB to MB, 1024 MB to GB.

186,000,000,000
/8
/1024
/1024
/1024
--------
21.65324985980987548828125
Click to expand...
Well I just think of it like this, a byte is .125 of a bit, so 186 Gb *.125 is 23.25GB/s. Then if you add overhead to Gb networking over fiber (which is 8b/10b I believe), it's actually 18.6GB/s ;) But who cares, it's fast.
 
NoOther said:
Actually its about 21.6 GB/s. Remember 8bits to a Byte, 1024 Bytes to a KB, 1024 KB to MB, 1024 MB to GB.

186,000,000,000
/8
/1024
/1024
/1024
--------
21.65324985980987548828125
Click to expand...
Actually, the math is incorrect. =P

186 Gbit/s divided by 8 bits per byte = 23.25 GBytes/s ;)
 
NoOther said:
And there lies the issue. Storage changed the measurement to use bytes, because bytes are easier to represent, and many memory and other technologies can work in bytes, but its not always the most accurate method. Too many times people try to apply the metric system with bytes, but it doesn't actually work that way. You have to do more calculations when using bytes rather than bits. Information itself is handled in terms of bits. So bits should be the proper way to define communication, and so they are.
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Storage never changed to bytes. Storage has *always* been done in bytes. The misleading thing in storage is that they define 1000 GigaBytes = 1 TeraByte, and so you end up with a 1TB HDD that is actually 1000 GB instead of 1024 GB.

That's where the problem is. The problem isn't in the system. The problem is with the companies.
 
aronesz said:
Oh it's already doable. Has been for a long time.

Of course, at the consequence of hospitalization and/or death. :D
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Or at the least, losing the ability to reproduce. :eek:

On the bright side, all that radiation could help someone grow a 3rd eye. :cool:
 
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