All things related to multicast

[Hugh LaMaster <>]

(This is a *very informal*, brief notification to the Internet2
Multicast WG of today's news.  There will be a press release
and so on, somewhere ["not my department"], so please, don't
quote this.  Quote the press releases, etc.  And, I'm not one of
the Principal Investigators, Project Mgr., etc.  I just worked
on the multicast portion.)


Today, the NASA Ames Biocomputation Center and NREN, and
other NASA internal partners (e.g. Glenn Research Center),
with participation from Abilene, CalREN-2, and local 
networks at Stanford and UCSC (many thanks to all the
participants), demonstrated a multicast-based telemedicine
application, across NREN, Abilene, and CalREN-2, at a 
data rate of 24 Mbits/sec (for today- we have done 50+ Mbits/sec
over many of the paths).

[There was more to the demonstration than multicast, but, I assume
that about all the Multicast WG needs to know is that this is a
real biocomputation/telemedicine application, and that parts of the
application use high-bandwidth multicast to deliver high-resolution
dynamic imaging.]

This is native multicast all the way, with all external peering 
network interfaces BGP4+ [MBGP], PIM-SM, MSDP enabled.  The links/
routers were able to sustain the rates of 24 Mbits/sec native 
multicast for long periods with minimal loss, in a WAN environment.


So, besides being kind of cool, it raises the question again
which was being discussed over the last couple of weeks: how
many *LANs* are able to deliver multicast in the 25-100 Mbps
range to "ordinary researchers" desktops, so that people can
make use of what is now available on WANs.


Hugh LaMaster
NASA NREN


P.S. Once again, thanks to all the network participants for their
time and personal sacrifices on this.  Almost all of it actually 
worked at demo time (!).


--
 Hugh LaMaster, M/S 233-21,    ASCII Email: 

 NASA Ames Research Center     Or:          

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