The transfer of data equivalent to two feature-length movies on DVD between California and Amsterdam in less than one second has been recognized as a new record by the Internet2 consortium. The operation, which achieved an average speed of more than 923 megabytes per second, was by an international team from several laboratories and involved a number of different networking systems.
The team comprised members of NIKHEF, SLAC, Caltech and the University of Amsterdam, with support from CERN. They used the advanced networking capabilities of TeraGrid, StarLight, SURFnet and NetherLight, together with optical networking links provided by Level 3 Communications and Cisco Systems. The transfer involved standard PC hardware running Debian GNU/LINUX in Amsterdam and redHat Linux in Sunnyvale. The team is supported by the EU-funded DataTAG project and by the US Department of Energy.
The Internet2 Land Speed Record is an open and ongoing competition run by Internet2, a consortium of 200 universities that are working with industry and government to develop network applications and technologies. The record-breaking event, which took place during the SC2002 conference in Baltimore in November, was judged on a combination of the bandwidth used and the distance covered using standard Internet (TCP/IP) protocols. By transferring 6.7 gigabytes across 10,978 km in 58 seconds, the transfer set a record of 9891.60 terabit metres per second.
