Purdue Streams a Movie At 7.5Gb/sec

the_psilo writes, "My friend just got back from the Supercomputing conference in Tampa, FL where she and the rest of the Purdue Envision Center rocked the High Performance Computing Bandwidth Challenge by streaming a 2-minute-long, 125-GB movie over a 10-Gb link at 7.5 Gb/sec. They used 6 Apple Xserve RAIDs connected to 12 clients projecting onto their tiled wall (that's 12 streams in all). Lots of accolades from the people who set up the challenge. More links to articles and reviews can be found at the Envision Center Bandwidth Challenge FAQ page." The two-minute video is a scientific visualization of a cell structure from a bacterium. The Envision Center site hosts a reduced version of the video.

Useful?

We all hope that this marvel of IT world will be used for things better than video streaming!

Help me out: using 75% of a 10Gb/s link "rocks"?

Help me out: using 75% of a 10Gb/s link "rocks"? If I read that right, usage was 7.5Gb of 10Gb total. What exactly was the Feat? (No, it's not in the Player's Manual.)

Re:Help me out: using 75% of a 10Gb/s link "rocks"

There is significant overhead associated with the use of TCP/IP. A typical 6.0 Mb/s connection will deliver appx. 4.2 Mb/s this is only about 70% of the connections actual bandwidth. So, 75% is looking pretty good.

What rocks is the ability to reliably deliver 7.5 Gb/s AND do something useful with it.

Re:Help me out: using 75% of a 10Gb/s link "rocks"

There is significant overhead associated with the use of TCP/IP.

Not to mention the hardware itself (NICs, routers, bridges, etc.) adds some not-insignificant overhead as well.

What rocks is the ability to reliably deliver 7.5 Gb/s AND do something useful with it.

Right. While any idiot can get 10 Gb/s link and get 7.5 Gb/s or more out of it, the real feat here was in doing something useful with it at the same time. Remember that in streaming video applications, there's typically a lot of dropped packets because the client has to actually do something with the video immediately. It may just buffer it, but the application that's doing the buffering is often busy doing other stuff as well, like, say decoding video and audio streams and actually piping all that data through to the I/O bus -- oh, and the NIC is usually sitting on that same I/O bus, so that makes things even worse.

Re:Help me out: using 75% of a 10Gb/s link "rocks"

There is significant overhead associated with the use of TCP/IP. A typical 6.0 Mb/s connection will deliver appx. 4.2 Mb/s this is only about 70% of the connections actual bandwidth.

While there is overhead associated with TCP/IP, it's nowhere near 30%. On a 100 Mbit link in a LAN, you routinely get 11 MB/s (just verified by transferring an Ubuntu image via FTP over the local ethernet with noname switching hardware). With a theoretical maximum of 12.5 MB/s, that's an efficacy of 90%.

6 Mbit sounds like a DSL connection to me. Quite possibly your provider or the servers you download from are responsible for your effective 4.2 Mbit, because TCP/IP isn't.

Just goes to prove..

This just proves that porn really is the driving factor in Internet growth. Cells are the basic building blocks of people and people are what make (most) porn, porn.

Hmmm, looks a bit blocky to me

Hmmm, looks a bit blocky to me. I think they need more key-frames, and less compression.

Reduced version?

We don't need no stinkin reduced version!

I'm sure our employers wouldn't mind if we took a look at the full version.

*psst* *psst* *psst* *mumble* *mumble* *mumble*

The whole thing? Really?

My boss has told me to take the full version of my personal desk stuff home now.

Only if...

That would have been worth watching if they were streaming an HD version of Snakes on a Plane.

Sooo...

2 minutes long & 125-GB
"A resolution of 4096x3072, with 24-bit color, running at 30 frames per second,"

What codec did they use?

Re:Sooo...

Probably no compression at all:

4096 * 3072 * 3 bytes per pixel = 36MB per frame (exactly... resolution I'll bet was not chosen randomly )

36 * 30 frames * 120 seconds = 126.5625 GB

About time the envision center actually did something. They have been a huge money pit for a long time. They demolished the pool hall in the student union which had been a student favorite for about 20 years for the center and have had very little actual results up until this point.

Purdue Alum

Hmmmm

A 2-minute-long, 125-GB movie... that must have been one super-high resolution chicken.

Not impressive

That's not that impressive in the scheme of things (ie Supercomputing 2006). We (Vanderbilt) were there, and we were streaming 35 Gb/sec for hours on end over a parallel filesystem we're developing. And even we weren't the fastest there. Going to Supercomputing is like stepping 3-4 years into the future.

Two minutes???

Two minutes??? But I want it noooooow!

And...

...underneath the table, behind the curtain where 12 BETAMAX machines hooked directly into the screens...

:-p

Purdue

Why in the world do they [perdue.com] need 7.5Gb/sec video streaming? Are they ramping up for a hi-def knockoff of Burger King's silly idea [subservientchicken.com]?

please serve me my tv now

Now if only my hard drive can cope up fast enough. Oh yeah who cares about hard drive if you can just get it somewhere and have it played 7.5 gb!

Use for the bandwidth

I have a friend who just got back from the same conference. He works at Ohio State University in the electron optics facility (read: likes to play with awesome equipment). Here's what he sent along to me: "This week I am in Tampa, Fl at the Supercomputing Conference "SC 06" with the guys from OSC (Ohio SuperComputer group). We have connected the Global Link boxes up and I am attempting to run the Quanta from Florida. Traffic is being routed from the conference to Atlanta, the Internet2, then though to the Third Frontier Network and back to OSU." With the bandwidth he had, he was able to observe, interact, and analyze a sample in a scanning electron microscope (the Quanta) in Ohio, in real time. Now that's a use for bandwidth; it's a lot cheaper to have a great internet connection than to buy the latest electron microscopes.

Does this add up?

Am I missing something? A 2 minute, 125GB movie streamed at 7.5GB/second.

125 / 7.5 = 16.67 seconds.

Was this a 16 - 17 second video? Was it truly "streamed". Maybe I just don't understand something stupid.

Re:Does this add up?

Am I missing something?

Yes.

125 / 7.5 = 16.67 seconds.

You're not converting your units properly. The 125 is measured in GB, while the 7.5 is measured in Gb.

Re:Does this add up?

Maybe I just don't understand something stupid.
You see, the internet is a series of tubes...

Why a 10g link would average 7.5g

When you try and fill a 10g pipe with a single tcp session, the congestion avoidance mechanisms of tcp will prevent you from filling the pipe. Essentially the sender will ramp up the rate of packets very quickly initially until the receiver sends back a congestion notification. The sender will then cut the send rate *in half*, and climb it back up very slowly - 1 extra byte per round-trip if memory serves (don't quote me on that). This works great for 100m, but to climb from 5g to 10g takes about 30 minutes if you have a cross-US round-trip-time (RTT).

To get around this you can:
1. Patch your TCP stacks with a few high-performance modifications
2. Figure out - using the RTT, interface buffer sizes, and bandwidth - what the number of outstanding packets can be before the receiver sends back a "slow down" message. Then configure the sender to have a smaller packet queue.

Great article on this here:
http://www.cisco.com/web/about/ac123/ac147/archive d_issues/ipj_9-2/gigabit_tcp.html [cisco.com]

It's tough to say if that was the problem here (I'm actually assuming it was not) since after a little digging I didn't see any details on their implementation. And no, I'm not interested in truly digging (I have a pesky job thingy to get back to).

But then..

..what happens to your own personal Internet?

wake me up....

wake me up when they do a live test using Jenna Jameson's film "Last Woman Standing".

Channeling Simpsons

Marge: Does the world really need that much porno?

Homer: {{drool}} One Million Times faster

Offtopic Question

I have a 1 Gb line running between my computers, and the top speed I have observed is around .1 to .2 Gb/s. Where is this very low bottleneck I am hitting? Is this in the HD transfer speed?

I'm shocked at this developement...

She?

First science... then "Meatholes"

The two-minute video is a scientific visualization of a cell structure from a bacterium.

It starts out noble that way.

Within a year, they will be streaming the most vile pornography allowed by human morals.

That's a surprise

I walk by the Envision Center at Purdue several times a week for class or work (I work at the building where Envision Center is located). Despite being at Purdue for 5 years, I've never actually gone into the Envision Center. They do have large LCD displays in the hallway by the entrance showing 3D molecules rotating, etc... If I recall, millions of dollars went into the creation of the Envision Center. I didn't realize they were doing cool things like this. I'll have to stop by there next week and see what it's all about.

NCDM won the bw challenge

I was at sc06 last week. I am working (as a research assistant) at that National Center for Datamining, University of Illinois at Chicago. We won this bandwidth challenge by transmittting data using the UDT [sf.net] protocol. The results are here https://scinet.supercomp.org/2006/bwc/ [supercomp.org] (click on the NCDM link).

Who reads the subject aynway?

The MPAA are set to reveal later today their new SLT (Streaming Lawsuit Technology) offering. This should make the extortion process easy and seamless for end-users.

I despise linked videos in wmv format

I've seen this quite a lot recently here, linking videos from the front page and they are in .wmv format. My fireFox doesnt show them, it offers to load a plugin, but fails to do so. I can go "manual" and it guides me to microsoft.com where I can some DRM-infested POS which doesnt like my OS etcetc.

Please, this is /. and not yahoo or msn, right? can we somehow convince our editors to stop standardising on microsoft orthodx video formats? thankx

In a related note

While trying this out with Real Player the Purdue team still got a buffering warning.

A disturbance in the Force

I smell a disturbance in the Force; as if a 1000 MPAA execs all suddenly crapped their pants at the same time.

so what?

This is hardly interesting, this isn't an accomplishment of any significance. Not are others claiming this has been done before, its really not very difficult.

The most difficult challenge, I think would be the matters of bus bandwidth and storage. As expected, the article makes note of the storage concerns, and they 'took the easy way out' and mirrored the data across several arrays.

What would be more impressive is if they used native infiniband storage arrays, could access them as a single NAS mount (rather than as JBOD) and even better if they could incorporate writing.

"Reduced" video

"The Envision Center site hosts a reduced version of the video."

Come on, this is slashdot, at least link to the full thing...

Bandwidth test from Slashdot and Digg

If they can handle that kind of bandwidth then its pretty much worthwhile :p

Xserve has 1 gbit ethernet

How could they possibly reach 7.5 gbit with 6 Xserves, if each Xserve only has a 1 gbit ethernet connection?

This looks to me like some desperate attempt to justify the money they wasted on bad (Apple!) hardware, drugs and hookers :-)

Isn't it ironic? Doncha think?

The movie they streamed was "Hoosiers". What are the odds?

</big10joke>