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Research Scientists to Use Network ("Pacific Research Platform") Much Faster Than Internet
A series of ultra-high-speed fiber-optic cables will weave a cluster of West Coast university laboratories and supercomputer centers into a network called the Pacific Research Platform as part of a five-year $5 million dollar grant from the National Science Foundation.
The network is meant to keep pace with the vast acceleration of data collection in fields such as physics, astronomy and genetics. It will not be directly connected to the Internet, but will make it possible to move data at speeds of 10 gigabits to 100 gigabits among 10 University of California campuses and 10 other universities and research institutions in several states, tens or hundreds of times faster than is typical now.
The challenge in moving large amounts of scientific data is that the open Internet is designed for transferring small amounts of data, like web pages, said Thomas A. DeFanti, a specialist in scientific visualization at the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, or Calit2, at the University of California, San Diego. While a conventional network connection might be rated at 10 gigabits per second, in practice scientists trying to transfer large amounts of data often find that the real rate is only a fraction of that capacity.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 02 2015, @12:52PM
The people who actually are behind it do not claim that this is faster than the Internet -- journalist's need for spectacular semi-quote there -- they merely state that the resulting network will be qualitatively better than the commodity Internet [slide 28 here [cenic.org]]. Which is true ofcourse, for any network with a decent speed, built on leased lines and running on your own network equipment.
As for the actual speeds, and (very) high level overview of the network structure, see my earlier reply to kc. The thing that rather surprises me is that only now they're talking about 100Gbps interconnecting these research institutions: I've participated in a 40Gbps VPLS interconnect implementation in 2009, on account of a client which was far less prestigious than Berkeley University or the San Diego Supercomputing Centre; the 100Gbps IEEE standard was released already in 2010.