News for and about the Internet2 community

["Michelle Pollak" <>]

INTERNET PERFORMANCE RECORDS SMASHED IN INTERNET2 LAND SPEED RECORD
COMPETITION

Caltech and CERN send more than one terabyte of data across 7,000 km of
network at 5.44 Gbps

Indianapolis, IN, October 16, 2003 - An international team has set a new
Internet2(R) Land Speed Record by transferring 1.1 terabytes of data across
more than 7,000 kilometers (nearly 4,300 miles) of network in less than 30
minutes, representing an average rate of more than 5.44 gigabits per second,
more than 20,000 times faster than a typical home broadband connection.

The mark of 38,420.54 terabit-meters per second was set by a team consisting
of members from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and CERN.

"The team from Caltech and CERN has demonstrated an unprecedented level of
high-performance networking, focused on supporting the requirements of
leading-edge research," said Rich Carlson, Chair of the I2-LSR judging
panel.  "This new I2-LSR mark shows that the capabilities of the underlying
network infrastructure are able to accommodate even the most demanding needs
of scientists around the world."

The new mark was announced today in conjunction with the Fall 2003 Internet2
Member Meeting.  The new record was set through the efforts of the DataTAG
and FAST projects, with major sponsorship from Cisco Systems, the European
Union, HP, Intel, Juniper Networks, Level 3 Communications, T-Systems, the
U.S. National Science Foundation, and the U.S. Department of Energy:
http://sravot.home.cern.ch/sravot/Networking/10GbE/LSR.htm.

"This is a major milestone towards our goal of providing on-demand access to
high energy physics data from around the world, using servers affordable to
physicists from all regions," said Professor Harvey Newman, head of the
Caltech team and chair of the ICFA Standing Committee on Inter-Regional
Connectivity.  "We have now reached the point where servers side by side
have the same TCP performance as servers separated by 10,000 km.  We also
localized the current bottleneck to the I/O capability of the end-systems,
and we expect that systems matching the full speed of a 10 Gbps link will be
commonplace in the relatively near future."

"This new record marks another major milestone towards our final goal of
abolishing distances and, in so doing, enabling more efficient worldwide
scientific collaboration," said Olivier Herve Martin, Head of External
Networking at CERN and Manager of the European Union DataTAG project.  "The
record further proves that it is no longer a dream to replicate terabytes of
data around the globe routinely and in a timely manner."

The Internet2 Land Speed Record is an open and ongoing competition.  Details
of the winning entries, complete rules, submission guidelines and additional
details are available at: http://lsr.internet2.edu/.

                                                # # #

About CERN and DataTAG
CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, has its headquarters
in Geneva.  At present, its Member States are Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria,
the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary,
Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, the Slovak Republic, Spain,
Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.  India, Israel, Japan, the
Russian Federation, the United States of America, Turkey, the European
Commission and UNESCO have observer status.

The DataTAG is a project co-funded by the European Union, the U.S.
Department of Energy, and the National Science Foundation.  It is led by
CERN together with four other partners.  The project brings together the
following European leading research agencies: Italy's Instituto Nazionale di
Fisica Nucleare (INFN), France's Institut National de Recherche en
Informatique et en Automatique (INRIA), the UK's Particle Physics and
Astronomy Research Council (PPARC), and Holland's University of Amsterdam
(UvA).  The DataTAG project is very closely associated with the European
Union DataGrid project, the largest grid project in Europe also led by CERN.
For more information, visit http://www.datatag.org.

About Caltech
With an outstanding faculty, including four Nobel laureates, and such
off-campus facilities as the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Palomar Observatory,
and the W.M. Keck Observatory, the California Institute of Technology is one
of the world's major research centers.  The Institute also conducts
instruction in science and engineering for a student body of approximately
900 undergraduates and 1,000 graduate students who maintain a high level of
scholarship and intellectual achievement Caltech's 124-acre campus is
situated in Pasadena, California, a city of 135,000 at the foot of the San
Gabriel Mountains, approximately 30 miles inland from the Pacific Ocean and
10 miles northeast of the Los Angeles Civic Center.  Caltech is an
independent, privately supported university, and is not affiliated with
either the University of California system or the California State
Polytechnic universities.  For more information about Caltech, visit:
http://www.caltech.edu.

About Internet2(R)
Led by more than 200 U.S. universities, working with industry and
government, Internet2 is developing and deploying advanced network
applications and technologies for research and higher education,
accelerating the creation of tomorrow's Internet.  Internet2 recreates the
partnerships among academia, industry, and government that helped foster
today's Internet in its infancy.  For more information about Internet2,
visit: http://www.internet2.edu/.

Contacts:
Internet2
Michelle Pollak

+1-202-285-4590

Caltech
Harvey Newman


CERN
Olivier Martin


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