* 10 Gigabit Ethernet circuit stretches from Tokyo to Geneva
Engineers around the world this week announced that they have set a record for “the world’s longest native 10 Gigabit Ethernet circuit for the transmission of data.”
The transmission was sent from the Japanese Data Reservoir project to the CERN research center in Geneva, Switzerland. The group says the length traveled was 18,500 kilometers – over 17 time zones.
It’s the ultimate in a local-area network technology going wide-area.
Engineers from Japan, Canada, the United States, the Netherlands and Switzerland participated in the event. They said that the project pushed the boundaries of global research and education networking, and that it could be the foundation for international research opportunities.
Computers on a LAN at the University of Tokyo used 10 Gig WAN PHY technology to connect to computers at CERN. According to the researchers, the computers appeared as if they were on the same LAN. In reality, the circuit passed from Tokyo to Seattle, through Canada to Chicago, and from Chicago to Amsterdam and on to Geneva.
Equipment from vendors such as Foundry Networks, Nortel and Cisco was used. Interestingly, the engineers said this is the first demonstration of interoperation among these vendors for the 10 Gigabit Ethernet WAN PHY and SONET/SDH gear.
So, what will the connection be used for? The initial project is to test and optimize the transfer of large TCP data flows along such a large connection. The research would be used for CERN’s planned Large Hadron Collider, to which the University of Tokyo is contributing a data analysis center.
The group says it was able to achieve an average transfer rate of 7.57G bit/sec for a TCP stream, using standard Ethernet frames. At each end was a high-end server that had a Chelsio 10 Gigabit Ethernet adapter.
In addition, the group was able to transfer at a rate of 9G bit/sec disk-to-disk, a rate that it says has not ever been achieved before with an intercontinental disk-to-disk situation.
