Fast Network Record

An international team of scientists and engineers for the 3rd consecutive year has smashed the network speed record, moving data along at an average rate of 100 gigabits per second (Gbps) for several hours at a time. A rate of 100 Gbps is sufficient for transmitting 5 feature-length DVD movies on the Internet from one location to another in a single second.

Physicists, computer scientists, and network engineers from all over the world formed this "High-Energy Physics" (HEP) team and joined forces to set a new world record for data transfer, capturing first prize at the Supercomputing 2005 (SC05) Bandwidth Challenge (BWC). The HEP team is led by the California Institute ofTechnology, the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), Fermilab, CERN, and the University of Michigan and partners at the University of Florida,Vanderbilt, and the Brookhaven National Lab, as well as international participants from the UK (University of Manchester and UKLight), Brazil (Rio de Janeiro State University, UERJ, and the State Universities of São Paulo,USP and UNESP), Korea (Kyungpook National University, KISTI) and Japan (theKEK Laboratory in Tsukuba).

The HEP team's demonstration of "Distributed TeraByte Particle Physics DataSample Analysis" achieved a peak throughput of 151 Gbps and an official mark of 131.6 Gbps measured by the BWC judges on 17 of the 22 optical fiber links used by the team, beating their previous mark for peak throughput of 101 Gbps by 50%. In addition to the impressive transfer rate for DVD movies, the new record data transfer speed is also equivalent to serving 10,000 MPEG2HDTV movies simultaneously in real time, or transmitting all of the printed content of the Library of Congress in 10 minutes. The team sustained average data rates above the 100 Gbps level for several hours for the first time, and transferred a total of 475 terabytes of physics data among the team's sites throughout the U.S. and overseas within 24 hours.

By demonstrating that many 10 Gbps wavelengths can be used efficiently over continental and transoceanic distances (often in both directions simultaneously), the HEP team showed that this vision of a worldwide dynamic Grid supporting many terabyte and larger data transactions is practical.

Further information about the demonstration may be found at: http://ultralight.caltech.edu/web-site/sc05
http://wwwiepm.slac.stanford.edu/monitoring/bulk/sc2005/hiperf.html
http://supercomputing.fnal.gov/
http://monalisa.caltech.edu

Holographic Memory

Holography was discovered 58 years ago and the first presentations of the principle of holographic recording was made 16 years after that. Holographic recording technology has the potential to realize 200-Gigabyte to 1-Terrabyte optical discs. [Good Article to read for technical details: "Holographic Memory" by Gregory T. Huang -- cover story of MIT's Technology Review, September, 2005]

Holographic recording is set to become the standard for the so-called 4th-generation optical disc. The 1st generation was the compact disc (CD), the 2nd was the digital videodisc (DVD), and the 3rd is currently being contested by the Blu-ray Disc and the High-Definition DVD (HD DVD).
The 4th-generation disc is expected to push capacity to between 200 Gbytes and 1 Tbyte. Once implemented, the first gainers would be users of data-intensive applications such as video editing and corporate data archiving.

Some of the key players in this sector are

• InPhase Technologies, Inc of the US. The company recently announced achievement of a recording density equivalent to 140 Gbytes when converted to a 12cm disc side.
• Optware Co Ltd of Japan reported successful operation of a 100-Gbyte disc.
• Sony Corp of Japan also developed an 80-Gigabyte disc based on holographic principles.
• Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology of Korea, Thomson of France, Philips Research of the Netherlands and Daewoo Electronics Corp of Korea are also having research and develpment activities in these directions.