I think the point is not to 'fill the pipes' but to explore the options that become available when bandwidth is not a restriction. Necessarily there is another condition: the bandwidth has to be essentially free. Empty pipes capably of handing bursty/intermittent/occasional traffic at very high transfer rates will allow for completely different long distance apps than we currently use. Think what Mr Gates has done to use up the abundant/free cpu cycles and RAM. Not always good/useful/desirable, but different from what we thought heavy use of computing was 30 years ago. Time was when a typewriter took no cpu cycles at all. Frank March Specialist Advisor, IT Policy Group Ministry of Economic Development, PO Box 1473, Wellington, NZ Ph: (+64 4) 474 2908; Fax: (+64 4) 471 2658
-----Original Message----- From: Joe Abley [SMTP:jabley(a)automagic.org] Sent: Monday, 25 February 2002 17:10 To: Stephen Donnelly Cc: nznog(a)list.waikato.ac.nz Subject: Re: Phew looks like we were lucky
On Sunday, February 24, 2002, at 10:37 , Stephen Donnelly wrote:
If your question Joe is 'what is the justification for internet2?', then I'd say there seems to be at least two commonly cited ones.
One is the use in current large applications such as 'grid' computing, a la DTF. Connecting super computer centres may consume a lot of bandwidth. Climate models, particle physics results etc.
How much bandwidth is "a lot of bandwidth"? I see commercial providers with multiple parallel STM-64s plumbed directly into routers either sides of the Atlantic and the Pacific, who are struggling to attract customers to even remotely fill the pipes. The situation in the metro and long-haul intracontinental networks is even more fibre-rich. I don't see a need to build another internet here -- I see a need to start using the existing one :)
The other one is that the internet2 is supposed to spurr new application development, showing what *can* be done with huge amounts of bandwidth when it's available at low cost. One of the more PR friendly applications would probably be the 'virtual teleconferencing' systems, where 3d models are transmitted along with the video, allowing participants to be rendered in 3d at each end. (Enables you to make direct eye contact, surprisingly important.)
This is the same answer as the one above, really -- "in order to obtain more bandwidth".
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