Internet Performance Records Smashed in Internet2 Land Speed Record Competition
Caltech and CERN send more than one terabyte of data across 7,000 km of network at 5.44 Gbps

INDIANAPOLIS, IN -- An international team has set a new Internet2® Land Speed Record by transferring 1.1 terabytes of data across more than 7,000 kilometers (nearly 4,300 miles) of network in less than 30 minutes, representing an average rate of more than 5.44 gigabits per second, more than 20,000 times faster than a typical home broadband connection.

The mark of 38,420.54 terabit-meters per second was set by a team consisting of members from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and CERN.

"The team from Caltech and CERN has demonstrated an unprecedented level of high-performance networking, focused on supporting the requirements of leading-edge research," said Rich Carlson, Chair of the I2-LSR judging panel. "This new I2-LSR mark shows that the capabilities of the underlying network infrastructure are able to accommodate even the most demanding needs of scientists around the world."

The new mark was announced today in conjunction with the Fall 2003 Internet2 Member Meeting. 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 Networks, Level 3 Communications, T-Systems, the U.S. National Science Foundation, and the U.S. Department of Energy: http://sravot.home.cern.ch/sravot/Networking/10GbE/LSR.htm.

"This is a major milestone towards our goal of providing on-demand access to high energy physics data from around the world, using servers affordable to physicists from all regions," said Professor Harvey Newman, head of the Caltech team and chair of the ICFA Standing Committee on Inter-Regional Connectivity. "We have now reached the point where servers side by side have the same TCP performance as servers separated by 10,000 km. We also localized the current bottleneck to the I/O capability of the end-systems, and we expect that systems matching the full speed of a 10 Gbps link will be commonplace in the relatively near future."

"This new record marks another major milestone towards our final goal of abolishing distances and, in so doing, enabling more efficient worldwide scientific collaboration," said Olivier Herve Martin, Head of External Networking at CERN and Manager of the European Union DataTAG project. "The record further proves that it is no longer a dream to replicate terabytes of data around the globe routinely and in a timely manner."

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://lsr.internet2.edu/.

About CERN and DataTAG
CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, has its headquarters in Geneva. At present, its Member States are Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, the Slovak Republic, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. India, Israel, Japan, the Russian Federation, the United States of America, Turkey, the European Commission and UNESCO have observer status.

The DataTAG is a project co-funded by the European Union, the U.S. Department of Energy, and the National Science Foundation. It is led by CERN together with four other partners. The project brings together the following European leading research agencies: Italy's Instituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN), France's Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique (INRIA), the UK's Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council (PPARC), and Holland's University of Amsterdam (UvA). The DataTAG project is very closely associated with the European Union DataGrid project, the largest grid project in Europe also led by CERN.

About Caltech
With an outstanding faculty, including four Nobel laureates, and such off-campus facilities as the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Palomar Observatory, and the W.M. Keck Observatory, the California Institute of Technology is one of the world's major research centers. The Institute also conducts instruction in science and engineering for a student body of approximately 900 undergraduates and 1,000 graduate students who maintain a high level of scholarship and intellectual achievement Caltech's 124-acre campus is situated in Pasadena, California, a city of 135,000 at the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains, approximately 30 miles inland from the Pacific Ocean and 10 miles northeast of the Los Angeles Civic Center. Caltech is an independent, privately supported university, and is not affiliated with either the University of California system or the California State Polytechnic universities.

About Internet2®
Led by more than 200 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.

Contact:
Michelle Pollak
Internet2
mpollak @ internet2.edu
ph: +1.202.285.4590

Harvey Newman
Caltech
newman @ hep.caltech.edu

Olivier Martin
CERN
olivier.martin @ cern.ch