BUSINESS: Scientists at CERN Set Internet2 Speed Record

Scientists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) set a new land-speed record for Internet2, a second-generation network serving universities and research institutes.

The team transferred 859 gigabytes of data in less than 17 minutes. It did so at a rate of 6.63 gigabits per second between the CERN facility in Geneva, Switzerland, and Caltech in Pasadena, Calif., a distance of more than 15,766 kilometers, or approximately 9,800 miles.

Scientists are racing to move gigantic amounts of data by 2007, when CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will switch on. This huge underground particle accelerator will produce some 15 petabytes of data a year, which will be stored and analyzed on a global grid of computer centers.

High-energy physicists are excited about the LHC because they hope it will allow them to find the Higgs boson, a theoretical particle that they believe creates mass. "Physicists are trying to fill in the blank spaces in our model of high energy physics," said Jim Gray a Microsoft Research engineer who helped set Wednesday's record.

Researchers aren't the only ones excited about blazing data speeds. This record speed of 6.63Gbps is equivalent to transferring a full-length DVD movie in four seconds. There are uses in astronomy, bioinformatics, global climate modeling and seismology, as well as commercial applications from entertainment to oil and gas exploration.

Copyright: Enterprise IT Planet