Labs set new Net speed record

Reuters
Published on ZDNet News:�October 15, 2003, 3:17 PM PT

Two major scientific research centers said Wednesday that they had set a new world speed record for sending data across the Internet, with a transmission equivalent to transferring a full-length DVD film in seven seconds.

The European Organization for Nuclear Research, CERN, said the feat was achieved in a nearly 30-minute transmission over 7,000 kilometers (4,350 miles) of network between Geneva and a partner body in California. The transmission doubled the previous top speed.

CERN, whose laboratories straddle the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva, said it had sent 1.1 terabytes of data at 5.44 gigabits per second to a lab at the California Institute of Technology, a major world research center, Oct. 1.

This is more than 20,000 times faster than a typical home broadband connection and is also equivalent to transferring a 60-minute compact disc within one second--an operation that takes about eight minutes over a standard broadband connection.

Using current technology, a DVD of a 90-minute film takes some 15 minutes to download from the Internet.

Olivier Martin of CERN, which is also home to the European Laboratory for Particle Physics and an ambitious particle-smashing project to unravel the fundamental laws of nature, hailed the feat as a milestone.

It would bring researchers closer to their final goal of abolishing distance and making collaboration between scientists around the world efficient and effectively instantaneous, he said.

Harvey Newman of Caltech said the achievement boosted hopes that systems that operate at 10 gigabits per second "will be commonplace in the relatively near future."

The previous fastest transfer--2.38gbps--was achieved in February this year by a joint team from CERN, Caltech, the U.S. Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Linear Accelerator Center at Stanford in California.