It’s only a two-minute animated video — with nary a Disney character on screen — yet Purdue University researchers are claiming that their transmission of it may represent the largest movie ever streamed over the Internet.
Whether that claim can withstand the critics’ barbs or not remains to be seen (I’ve asked Purdue to let me know on what it is based — update below), but there can be no doubt that we are talking about a porky pig of a short feature here — or that it was delivered in a flash.
“The two-minute animated video, which was a scientific visualization of a cell structure from a bacterium, was streamed at a rate of 7.5 gigabits per second with a peak transfer rate of 8.4 gigabits per second,” according to a university press account. “At that speed, the researchers could have transmitted approximately 12 movie DVDs in the same two minutes.”
Three MPAA officials just keeled over in shock at reading that sentence.
“The video measured 4096 pixels by 3072 pixels, which is the equivalent of 12 17-inch computer monitors arranged in a grid three monitors high and four monitors wide,” according to Purdue.
The news gets even more stomach churning for those MPAA execs:
“The video was not compressed and it wasn’t done using expensive, highly specialized equipment,” says Laura Arns, associate director and research scientist at Purdue’s Envision Center for Data Perceptualization. “The equipment could have been purchased off the shelf for less than $100,000.”
While implications for the entertainment industry — including porn, of course — may leap foremost to mind, the researchers have more high-minded objectives on their radar, such as allowing for better collaboration on drug research or viewing the prodigious output of the Hubble telescope.
While a colleague told me to “make sure to note they did it over a the high-speed National LambdaRail research network, which I am guessing isn’t clogged by e-mail, Web surfing and people watching YouTube,” the researchers themselves give no ground as to the degree of difficulty here.
“This is actually technically tricky to do,” says Dwight McKay, director of systems engineering for Information Technology at Purdue. “You have to have multiple data readers sending the video into the pipe and multiple readers receiving information on the other end. We’ve created a way to break this animation into segments, one for each tile of the tiled display, send it across the country and then have it reassemble on the display as one piece, all in real time.”
Contributing to the Purdue project were Apple Computer, which provided six Xserve Raid storage devices, and Advanced Clustering Technologies, which kicked in six rack-mounted server machines.
No word on which dorm this stuff can be found in now.
(Update: Here’s what a Purdue spokesman has to say about that “might be the largest” claim: “As you might imagine, there’s no official list of biggest videos streamed over the Internet. But our team of researchers and their supervisors all checked off on the news release and were comfortable with it, and they are experts in research computing and data visualization. There was no way to be completely sure, unfortunately, and if someone shows us that we were wrong, we’ll correct that.”)
