University of Tokyo Team Set New Performance Threshold for Long-Distance Data Transfer Using IPv4; Caltech and CERN Team Set New Mark Using Next Generation Internet Protocol

Arlington, VA -- May 4, 2005 -- Internet2 today announced that two separate international teams have each set new Internet2 Land Speed Records (I2-LSR) in both the IPv4 and IPv6 categories. As an open and ongoing competition for the highest-bandwidth, end-to-end networks, Internet2 LSR marks represent the rate at which data is transferred multiplied by the distance traveled.

IPv4 Single and Multi-Stream Record

A team from University of Tokyo, the Japanese WIDE Project, Chelsio Communications, Fujitsu Computer Technologies, LTD, NTT Communications, APAN, JGN2, SURFnet, CANARIE, IEEAF, Pacific Northwest Gigapop, StarLight and Universiteit van Amsterdam has set a new record in the Internet2 Land Speed Record (I2-LSR) competition in the IPv4 category.

The new records in the IPv4 Single-Stream and Multi-Stream categories were set by transferring 7.21 gigabits of data per second (Gbps) across a network path spanning a distance nearly three-quarters the circumference of the Earth - 30,000 kilometers long. The data traversed the WIDE, APAN, JGN2, IEEAF, CANARIE, SURFnet, and Abilene networks. Achieving a mark of 216,300 terabit-meters per second (Tb-m/s), the team surpassed the existing Single-Stream record by over 66,000 Tb-m/s and the previous Multi-Stream record by over 30,000 TB-m/s.

The team utilized an "Inter-layer coordinating optimization" technology developed by the Data Reservoir project at the University of Tokyo and used 10 Gbps Ethernet adapters with TCP offloading capabilities by Chelsio Communications.

For more information about the IPv4 record-setting attempt, see: http://data-reservoir.adm.s.u-tokyo.ac.jp/lsr-20041225/

IPv6 Single and Multi-Stream Record

Using the next generation Internet protocol IPv6, a team from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and CERN set a new mark in the I2-LSR's IPv6 Single and Multi-Stream categories. The team set the record by transferring 5.11 gigabits of data per second (Gbps) across a network path of more than 14,000 kilometers. The mark of 72,225 Tb-m/s nearly doubled the previous IPv6 mark. The record was set with the support of the National Center for Data Mining (NCDM), Cisco Systems, and Neterion.

For more information about the IPv6 record-setting attempt, see: http://emartell.home.cern.ch/emartell/done/cern/ipv6_lsr_jan05/lsr6jan05.html

Both record-setting teams received awards at a special ceremony held during the Internet2 Spring 2005 Member Meeting - May 2-4, 2005 in Arlington, Virginia. Details of past winning entries, complete rules, submission guidelines, and additional details are available at: http://lsr.internet2.edu/

About Internet2(R)
Led by more than 200 U.S. universities working with industry and government, Internet2 develops and deploys 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, visit: www.internet2.edu

Media Contact:
Lauren Kallens
Internet2
lkallens @ internet2.edu
ph. +1-202-331-5345

The Pacific Northwest Gigapop (PNWGP) Circular is an occasional update of news for and about PNWGP and Pacific Wave participants. To subscribe or unsubscribe to this update service, send email to gigapop-info@pnw-gigapop.net

In this Circular 004

PRICE REDUCTION ON COMMODITY INTERNET SERVICES
PNWGP UPGRADES COMMODITY INTERNET CIRCUITS
UNIVERSITY OF ALASKA SETS INTERNET2 LAND SPEED RECORD
PACIFIC WAVE JOINS APAN
PACIFIC WAVE AND IPv6
NEW INTERNET ROUTING REGISTRY POLICY IN EFFECT OCTOBER 1
PNWGP EXPANDS PEERING RELATIONSHIPS
INTERNET2 FALL MEMBER MEETING IN LOS ANGELES OCTOBER 2002
CURRENT PNWGP AND PACIFIC WAVE PARTICIPANTS
UPDATING YOUR CONTACT INFORMATION
PNWGP CONTACT LIST

PRICE REDUCTION ON COMMODITY INTERNET SERVICES

Effective October 1, 2002, the Pacific Northwest Gigapop will reduce its fees for all commodity Internet services.

• Port fees for Abilene plus Commodity Internet Services will sink from $7990/mo to $5995/mo (Usage fees for this service remain at $275/Mbps)
• Usage fees for Commodity Internet Services will drop from $400/Mbps to $325/Mbps (Monthly port fees for this service remain unchanged at $2995/mo)

Additional savings are available to those organizations with monthly use levels regularly at or above 50Mbps.

There are three contributing factors to this decrease in PNWGP commodity service fees.

• The telecommunications industry shakeup of the past 18 months has
  resulted in a lowering of IP transit fees.
• The PNWGP has been an active member of The Quilt, a national collaboration of gigapops, and through The Quilt has been able to participate in some lower-cost aggregate IP transit purchases.
• An increase in peering relationships by the PNWGP has diverted some of the traffic that would have gone over commodity links through regional peering points.

To receive the PNWGP Service Catalog reflecting this new pricing, please send email to gigapop-info@pnw-gigapop.net

PNWGP UPGRADES COMMODITY INTERNET CIRCUITS

The PNWGP estimates that the collective monthly commodity Internet bandwidth needs of its participants will reach 875Mbps by the end of this school year. To accommodate this growth, commodity Internet services for PNWGP have once again been expanded.

Last year, the PNWGP increased commodity Internet bandwidth from 445Mbps to 1.45Gbps. This year, the commodity capabilities have been expanded to 3Gbps. The new commodity services configuration provides unprecedented redundancy options, plus room to grow.

PNWGP will receive 1Gbps circuit from each of the following vendors: Level3, Verio, and Cable & Wireless. A failure or poor performance in any given circuit can easily be absorbed by the remaining two circuits. The new configuration also allows for simplified BGP configurations while continuing to offer optimal IP packet routes to and from the Internet.

In addition to retaining vendor diversity, these GbE (Gigabit Ethernet) commodity circuits are made at two geographically diverse connections at two separate nodes within Seattle, Washington, U.S.A. Some of the criteria used by the PNWGP in selection of IP transit providers are

National backbone
Seattle ingress/egress
Overall technical competence
Multicast service capability
BGP support
Significant peering with Tier One providers at multiple locations throughout the country
Response policies to security incidents
Engineering of their Point of Presence facilities
Backbone engineering
Corporate financial viability

UNIVERSITY OF ALASKA SETS INTERNET2 LAND SPEED RECORD

Congratulations to the teams at the University of Alaska (led by Kerry Digou) and the University of Amsterdam (led by Erik-Jan Bos) who blasted the Internet2 Land Speed Record last May! 625Megabytes of data were transferred from Fairbanks to Amsterdam at a rate of 401 Mbps.

See the full press release at http://archives.internet2.edu/guest/archives/I2-NEWS/log200205/msg00003.html

PACIFIC WAVE JOINS APAN

In September, Pacific Wave was accepted as an affiliate member of the Asia-Pacific Advanced Network (APAN). This higher-profile role in the APAN community will help the PNWGP in structuring its Pacific Wave services to meet the diverse and changing needs of Pacific Rim research and education partners, some of which are already active today at Pacific Wave, including AARNet and TANET2. APAN itself is also a Pacific Wave participant today through TransPAC.

Pacific Wave hopes to use this opportunity to leverage large-scale research and education projects between our regions, particularly in the areas of the physical sciences and health care.

PACIFIC WAVE AND IPV6

PNWGP regularly receive inquiries about IPv6 capabilities at Pacific Wave. The Pacific Wave switch infrastructure is capable of passing IPv6 traffic so long as each of the peering parties supports IPv6 on their Pacific Wave connected routers.

NEW INTERNET ROUTING REGISTRY POLICY IN EFFECT OCTOBER 1, 2002

Technical contacts at all PNWGP commodity transit sites were notified a few weeks ago of the upcoming implementation of a new Internet Routing Registry Policy by the PNWGP. In order to assure that your commodity routes are effectively and efficiently propagated over the PNWGP commodity circuits, your site will need to abide by this new policy. The full text can be found at http://www.pnw-gigapop.net/tech/irr.html

PNWGP EXPANDS PEERING RELATIONSHIPS

In the past six months, PNWGP staff spent considerable resources aimed at 'keeping local traffic local.' By becoming an active peer at strategic locations, data not only reaches its destination more efficiently, but money is saved as well.

In May of this year, the PNWGP joined the Northwest Access Exchange (NWAX) in Portland, Oregon (see http://www.nwax.org).

In August, the PNWGP joined the Seattle Internet Exchange (SIX) in Seattle, Washington (see http://www.seattleix.net).

Additional peering opportunities will be opened within the next few weeks for Pacific Wave participants, as well as the PNWGP.

Approximately 200Mbps (monthly 95th percentile) is being transmitted through PNWGP peering relationships, exclusive of Pacific Wave. Total peering traffic through Pacific Wave runs at about 500Mbps (monthly 95th percentile).

INTERNET2 FALL MEETING IN LOS ANGELES OCTOBER 2002

Internet2/UCAID will have its fall member meeting in Los Angeles, October 27-30th. For more information, see http://www.internet2.edu/activities/html/fall_02.html

CURRENT PNWGP AND PACIFIC WAVE PARTICIPANTS

Pacific Wave International Peering Services Participants
    AARNet
    ATTBI
    CA*net 4
    Defense Research & Engineering Network (DREN)
    Energy Sciences Network (ESNet)
    Microsoft Corporation
    Peer1.net
    Pointshare
    TransPAC
    TANET2

Pacific Northwest Gigapop Transit Participants
    Arctic Region Supercomputing Center
    AARNet (Australian Academic and Research Network)
    Children's Hospital and Regional Medical Center
    City of Seattle
    -- King County
    -- Seattle Public Library
    Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center
    Institute for Systems Biology
    Microsoft Research
    Montana State University
    National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration/Pacific Marine
    -- Environmental Laboratory (NOAA/PMEL)
    Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
    Portland Research and Education Network
    -- Oregon Graduate Institute
    -- Oregon Health & Sciences University
    -- Portland State University
    Seattle Cancer Care Alliance
    Seattle Community College District
    Seattle Pacific University
    University of Alaska
    University of Idaho
    University of Montana
    University of Washington
    Washington State Dept. of Information Services
    Washington State K-20 Network
    Washington State University
 

UPDATING YOUR CONTACT INFORMATION

If you have changes in contact info for administration, billing, technical, routing, tech backup, or outages notifications, please email gigapop-info@pnw-gigapop.net or call 206-934-5588.

PNWGP CONTACT LIST

General Information & Circular Subscriptions
1-206-934-5588 / 1-888-934-5588
gigapop-info@pnw-gigapop.net
www.pnw-gigapop.net
www.pacificwave.net

Network Operations Center (7x24)
1-206-934-5580 / 1-888-934-5580
noc@pnw-gigapop.net

Web Site Contact
webmaster@pnw-gigapop.net

PNWGP Services Manager
Jan Eveleth
1-206-221-2300
eveleth@cac.washington.edu

Network Engineering Manager
David Richardson
1-206-934-5580

Mailing Address
4545 15th Ave N.E.
Seattle, Washington 98105-4527
USA

Fax
1-206-934-5589 / 1-888-934-5589

More information about Internet2 can be found at
http://www.internet2.edu/

Circular 004 September 2002
Copyright (c) 2002 Pacific Northwest Gigapop

WASHINGTON D.C. - May 7, 2002: An international team set a new record for Internet performance by transferring the equivalent of an entire compact disc's contents across more than 7608 miles (12,272 km) of network in 13 seconds. The rate of 401 megabits per second achieved in transferring 625 megabytes of data from Fairbanks, Alaska to Amsterdam in the Netherlands is over 8000 times greater than the fastest dial-up modem.

The record-setting team consisted of the University of Alaska at Fairbanks; the Faculty of Science of the University of Amsterdam; and SURFnet, the national computer network for higher education and research in the Netherlands. In setting the new Internet2 Land Speed Record (I2-LSR) they used the networking capabilities of the Pacific Northwest Gigapop, an access point to leading edge networks; the Internet2 Abilene backbone network; StarLight, the advanced optical infrastructure and proving ground in Chicago, Illinois; and SURFnet.

The high-speed SURFnet connections used to set this record were developed as part of the GigaPort project, the Dutch Next Generation Internet initiative. The interconnection between SURFnet's PoPs in Amsterdam and Chicago uses Global Crossing's virtual private network service. On both ends standard PC-like hardware running Debian GNU/LINUX was used.

"Today's high-performance Internet networks in at least the US and the Netherlands, as well as the interconnection between the two, have no bottlenecks any more for high speed data applications," said Erik-Jan Bos, Manager Network Services at SURFnet. "What we found is that the bottleneck has shifted towards the very end of the connections: the computers in use with limited bandwidths on the bus."

"This shows that geography is no barrier to advanced network applications," said Kerry Digou, systems programmer who headed the University of Alaska team. "Using standard equipment and infrastructure developed in the Internet2 community, we've pushed the boundaries to the edges."

Cees de Laat, researcher at the Faculty of Science of the University of Amsterdam and member of the Grid Forum Steering Group, adds: "High-speed backbones are essential for today's Grid Applications where scientists on a global scale want to handle terabyte size datasets in international collaborations. This Land Speed Record shows what two distant locations can do together when they set their mind to it."

"The new Internet2 Land Speed Record demonstrates that high-performance networking is not constrained by national boundaries," said Rich Carlson, network research scientist at Argonne National Laboratory, and chair of the I2-LSR judging panel. "The international team involved in this effort has set a new standard for wide area, high-performance networking."

Entries were judged on a combination of how much bandwidth they used and how much distance they covered end to end, using standard Internet (TCP/IP) protocols. 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://www.internet2.edu/html/i2lsr.shtml

About Internet2(R): Led by over 190 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, see http://www.internet2.edu/

About SURFnet and GigaPort: SURFnet operates and innovates the national research network, to which 150 institutions in higher education and research in the Netherlands are connected. To remain in the lead, SURFnet puts in a sustained effort to improve the infrastructure and to develop new applications to give users faster and better access to new Internet services. SURFnet is partner in GigaPort, a project of the Dutch government, trade and industry, educational institutions and research institutes which aims to give the Netherlands a head start in the development and use of advanced and innovative Internet technology. For more information, see http://www.surfnet.nl/en/ and http://www.gigaport.nl/

The Faculty of Science of University of Amsterdam: The Advanced Internet Research group of the University of Amsterdam's Faculty of Science researches new architectures and protocols for the Internet. It actively participates in worldwide standardization organizations such as the Internet Engineering Task Force and the Global Grid Forum. The group conducts experiments with extremely high-speed network infrastructures. The Institute carries out groundbreaking research in the fields of security, authorization, authentication and accounting for Grid environments. The Institute is developing a virtual laboratory based on Grid technology for e-science applications. For more information, see http://www.science.uva.nl/research/air/

About the University of Alaska: The University of Alaska is Alaska's only public system of higher education. The system, which covers an area one-fifth the size of the contiguous United States, is comprised of three multi-mission universities located in Anchorage, Fairbanks, and Juneau, with extended satellite colleges and sites throughout Alaska that provide educational services to urban and rural populations of diverse cultural backgrounds. The university is a land-, sea-, and space-grant institution with strong state and federally funded research programs. For more information, see http://www.alaska.edu

Contacts:

Greg Wood
Internet2
ghwood@internet2.edu
202-331-5360

Sandra Passchier
SURFnet
sandra.passchier@surfnet.nl
+31 30-2305305

Robert L. Miller
University of Alaska
bob.miller@alaska.edu
907-474-6311