Wired: Data Flood Feeds Need for Speed

“The team set the Internet2 Land Speed Record in November at
SC2002, a high-performance networking conference. Internet2, a
coalition of universities that have developed a high-performance
research and education network separate from the public Internet,
modeled the contest after the Land Speed Record competition, where
drivers compete to set speed records on Utah’s salt flats.

“The team sent 6.7 GB of uncompressed data at 923 megabits per
second in just 58 seconds from Sunnyvale, California, to Amsterdam.
That’s the data equivalent of four hours of DVD-quality movies, and
a transfer speed 3,500 times faster than a typical household
broadband connection.

“Data was transmitted by packets called jumbo frames, which are
9,000 bytes–six times as big as the packets normally sent over the
Internet. The team used PCs running Debian GNU/Linux in Amsterdam
and RedHat Linux in Sunnyvale. Cisco provided a router.

“The record is another step forward for high-performance
computing…”

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