From Starlight in Chicago (USA)

1
Data Transfer
Land Speed Record
From Starlight in Chicago (USA) to CERN in Geneva
(Switzerland), 1.1TeraByte of data has flown
across 7067 Km in less than half an hour, at
the TCP rate of 5.44 Gbps i.e. 38,420.54
petabit-meters per second
2
Caltech, the California Institute of Technology
and CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear
Research, established a new Internet2 Land Speed
record on 1 October 2003 by transferring 1.1
Terabytes of data in less than 30 minutes at 5.44
Gigabits per second (Gbps) across the 7,000
kilometers long 10Gbps DataTAG optical circuit
between CERN in Geneva and the Starlight exchange
point in Chicago. The average rate of 5.44Gbps is
more than 20,000 times faster than a typical home
broadband connection. The international team
smashed their own record of 2.38 Gbps achieved in
February together with Los Alamos National
Laboratory (LANL) and Stanford Linear Accelerator
Center (SLAC) by a factor of 2.28 in absolute
speed and 1.6 using Petabit-meters/seconds
metrics. The award ceremony took place on 16
October in Indianapolis on the occasion of the
Internet2 fall member meeting. The team from
Caltech and CERN have demonstrated an
unprecedented level of high-performance
networking, focused on supporting the
requirements of leading-edge research," said Rich
Carlson, Chair of the Internet2 land speed record
(I2-LSR) judging panel. "This new I2-LSR mark
shows that the capabilities of the underlying
network infrastructure is able to accommodate
even the most demanding needs of scientists
around the world."  

• This speed record is equivalent to
• Transferring a full 680 Mbytes CD in 1 second
  (i.e. 3600 CDs/hour)
• Transferring 450 full length DVD movies in one
  hour (i.e. 1 DVD in 8 seconds)

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, Level 3 Communications,
T-Systems, the US National Science Foundation,
and the US Department of Energy. The extension of
the 10Gbps DataTAG testbed to the Telecom World
2003 exhibition hall in Palexpo was made possible
thanks to Cisco Systems, OPI (Geneva's Office for
the Promotion of Industries Technologies), SIG
(Services Industriels de Genève) and Telehouse
Europe.
Caltech www.caltech.edu CERN www.cern.ch
Internet2 Land Speed Record lsr.internet2.edu