At 11:06 AM 10/9/96 -0400, you wrote:
"Dorian R. Kim" writes:
This sort of proposal, i.e. building a Higher Ed private network for research, is in and of itself not such a bad thing.
The grow of Internet since NSFNet shut down has put serious strains on the infrastructure that researchy folks used to use to do(and still do) their various work on.
You know, maybe I'm crazy but I rarely see the troubles that people mention so often.
The problems are real. We (NCSA) have users that can ftp a 500MB-1GB file to a site relatively close (Internet-topology-wise) but the the damn thing times out when they try to ftp to it to us, two NSPs plus a NAP or private interconnect away. We're sure it's not our pipe to the Internet, since we have a DS3 that _peaks_ at 50% utilization and usually hovers somewhere around 10%-20%. The problem is probably less the way the Internet has been built but the dynamics of TCP. The current Internet architecture only magnifies the problem. As Matt Mathis points out, the needs that Internet serves today and the needs of high-end network users are orthogonal.
When I'm going between my site and another site on the net, if both ends are unloaded, I typically get bandwidth equal to the smaller of the two pipes into the net. Its very rare that I don't get transfer times near the maximum expected, even when one of the pipes is attached to a mediocre provider. (Really bad providers are another story, but I luckily can usually convince my clients not to use them).
Have you tried this with two DS3 pipes at opposite ends of the Internet (i.e. from two different NSPs at different ends of the US)?
Seems to me that if the university researchers are sick of competing with the undergrads, either the university could get a fatter pipe, or they could priority queue the traffic from the researchers, and either way they would probably win.
But they can't priority queue traffic coming back to them. If the undergrads' incoming traffic keeps their ACKs and return traffic from getting back to them, they're still screwed.
Even with all the well-publicized growing pains at the providers, I think the trouble is most likely at the end points, and not in the providers.
What they want is a fatter pipe with end-to-end priority queing. (Give me the list of ISPs providing this today or have announced it. I want to talk to them.) This way the researchers can take advantage of the extra bandwidth they're paying for and the undergrads can continue using what they're using today. --zawada Paul J. Zawada, RCDD | Senior Network Engineer zawada@ncsa.uiuc.edu | National Center for Supercomputing Applications +1 217 244 4728 | http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/People/zawada
"Paul J. Zawada" writes:
The problem is probably less the way the Internet has been built but the dynamics of TCP.
Or perhaps, more accurately, HTTP's abuse of TCP has been magnifying the load difficulties...
Have you tried this with two DS3 pipes at opposite ends of the Internet (i.e. from two different NSPs at different ends of the US)?
I must admit that I have not (only T1s), but then again, with many providers still on DS3 backbones, I would not expect to get 100% performance from DS3s for a few years to come. If you really need guaranteed DS3 performance between point A and point B most of the time, you are going to have to arrange for it specially for the near future. BTW, different ends of the US is totally irrelevant. My packets across town frequently travel by way of the other coast. I still tend to get pretty good performance at frac T1 levels. Perry
At the recent Cheyenne Mountain Conference (http://www.farnet.org/cheyenne/), the invited guest speaker, Dr. Ivan Moura Campos of Brazil's Science and Technology Ministry, showed a spiral starting at the origin and four labeled quadrants to illustrate a technology transfer development model (http://www.farnet.org/cheyenne/archive/campos.ppt). The basic idea is that governments might sponsor R&D (lower left quadrant), transfer it to working prototypes along with partners (lower right quadrant), then, following some restructuring, to operational status with parthers, and then to a commodity service (commercial acvceptance). The spiral continues through additional cycles. (My own further interpretation is that, just as the size of the spiral coontinues to grow with each revolution, the resources needed to execute successive cycles also continue to grow. When I saw Ivan at COMDEX-SP in São Paulo a few weeks ago, he agreed that this interpretation was fitting.) Internet II might be viewed in that light. It is not an exclusive development, but one that could be incubated in a pilot-like partnership setting and transferred to more general operational status as the kinks are worked out of the system (which, in itself might require a great leap of faith as in the case of most new developments). Internet II would not be "instead of Internet," but, to the degree that it can find workable solutions to vexing Internet problems, as an adjunct to Internet. --Steve G.
participants (3)
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Paul J. Zawada -
Perry E. Metzger -
Steve Goldstein