[NetBehaviour] High-speed academic networks and the future of the Internet (Internet 2)

[marc garrett]

High-speed academic networks and the future of the Internet (Internet 2)
By John Timmer

Building and using dedicated networks

As we recently reported, the Internet's backbone should be able to scale 
to handle the sheer volume of traffic that it's expected to face in the 
foreseeable future. But a number of factors complicate any analysis 
based on the simple volume figures. Many services, such as VoIP and 
streaming video, create expectations of guaranteed bandwidth that may be 
tough to maintain in the face of vast volumes of spam and P2P traffic; 
everything may get there, but not necessarily when we'd like it to. 
Meanwhile, problems with the "last mile" networks can obscure the 
capacity of the network backbone.

The academic world has faced similar issues for a while, and will soon 
be facing a flood of data from the biggest news in physics, the 
activation of the Large Hadron Collider. The data gathered at the LHC, 
located at CERN outside of Geneva, will be distributed to a worldwide 
grid of computer clusters for analysis, which will require sustained 
transfers well in excess of 10 Gigabits per second. To get a sense of 
how the academic world is solving its networking needs and what that 
might mean for the future of general networking, we spoke with 
executives at Internet2 and the European network provider DANTE.

more...
http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/future-internet.ars