With the glossing over of details that goes with press releases there appears to be a misunderstanding here. I never said we paid list prices. I am well aware that one can get large discounts from vendors. However, I think it is important to quote a well known price (in this case list), which people can relate to how well they think they can negotiate (otherwise it just becomes a bragging point of who can get the largest discount), and gets away from the point of giving people an idea of what it might cost. In our case we got 100% (free) discounts from Level(3) and Cisco for the Sunnyvale to Chicago link and the GSR.
The link from StarLight to Amsterdam was put in place for a European funded demonstration (since turned into a production link), the equipment was mainly funded by another European research project.
At the same time, getting it for free has its costs, one has much less leverage with the vendors as to delivery (and retrieval) dates, reliability etc. as well as the headaches of getting everything (PCs, loaned NIC cards, Routers, links) to come together, to keep the vendors interest, extend the loan etc.
High speed at reasonable costs are the end-goal. However, it is important to be able to plan for when one will need such links, to know what one will be able to achieve, and for regular users to be ready to use them when the commonly available. This takes some effort up front to achieve and demonstrate.
With the glossing over of details that goes with press releases there
appears to be a misunderstanding here. I never said we paid list prices.
I am well aware that one can get large discounts from vendors. However, I
think it is important to quote a well known price (in this case list),
which people can relate to how well they think they can negotiate
(otherwise it just becomes a bragging point of who can get the largest
discount), and gets away from the point of giving people an idea of what
it might cost. In our case we got 100% (free) discounts from Level(3) and
Cisco for the Sunnyvale to Chicago link and the GSR.
Ok, after such explanation, I am more than willing to accept that it could
be a good use of the money, including the money that was paid to people to
sit and tweak parameters of gear, kernels, NIC cards to achieve
imporovements in speed (since no one in production world can justify having
people on the clock doing just that to document the smallest possible
improvements).
High speed at reasonable costs are the end-goal. However, it is important
to be able to plan for when one will need such links, to know what one
will be able to achieve, and for regular users to be ready to use them
when the commonly available. This takes some effort up front to achieve
and demonstrate.
True, however as it was mentioned before, why not do the same type of
testing in a lab environment between a couple of boxes having the TCP stack
insert appropriate delays? When in 1995 we were getting simplex IP links
over satellites up that is how we did the testing before bringing them up
on the birds.
Alex
Date: Sat, 08 Mar 2003 13:13:53 -0800
From: "Cottrell, Les"
The link from StarLight to Amsterdam was put in place for a
man 4 dummynet
High speed at reasonable costs are the end-goal. However, it
is important to be able to plan for when one will need such
links, to know what one will be able to achieve, and for
regular users to be ready to use them when the commonly
available. This takes some effort up front to achieve and
demonstrate.
The thing is we already know that large buffers help greatly.
Seeing how fast one can push a box with big buffers might be
cool, but is it accomplishing anything? As you demonstrated,
anyone who needs that speed here and now can get a private line
and use a stock *ix install. Done/done.
How about other models? Limited server buffers (it's nice to
handle more than 25 simultaneous streams), random-bandwidth
clients, congestion, jitter... how were those treated? Have
these been explored?
If there's going to be research, let's see some TCP stack tuning
and the results. Investigating other protocols would be nice;
perhaps the scope of the contest should be changed. The level of
"research" in unleashing bone-stock equipment is more appropriate
for an undergrad paper than a news release.
Eddy