Thanks to the availability of a unique 2.5Gb/s then 10Gb/s transatlantic testbed and the strong support of Internet2/Abilene, the DataTAG partners together with their US colleagues quickly established themselves as a leader in very high speed networking. Most of the accumulated knowledge is available from the DataTAG Web site (e.g. "How to tune TCP for gigabit networks", Linux kernel map, various Linux patches, etc).
DataTAG has collaborated widely within the community and, with partners, has won several well-recognised awards in the field of high-speed networks. This includes winning the Internet2 Land Speed Record in both IPv4 and IPv6 categories for both single and multiple stream operations in October 2003 and February 2004 when previously established DataTAG records were beaten.
DataTAG was a member of the consortium that won the SuperComputing 2003 Bandwidth Challenge, Sustained Bandwidth Award when a record bandwidth mark of 23.2 Gbps was achieved. This latter was exceptional not only for the absolute bandwidth demonstrated but also because of its reliance on the implementations of new TCP stacks that have been a feature of the DataTAG WP2 work.
Since November 2002, 9 new Internet2 landspeed record has already been established by DataTAG in close collaboration with Caltech. The IPv4 record, established on February 27th-28th 2003 by a team from Caltech, CERN, LANL and SLAC with a single 2.38Gbps stream over a 10000km path between Geneva and Sunnyvale through Chicago, has been entered in the Science and Technology section of the Guinness book of records. Likewise, a new IPv6 record was established on May 6th 2003 by a team from Caltech and CERN with a single 983Mbps stream over a 7067 km path between Geneva and Chicago.
Thanks to the availability of the 10Gb/s DataTAG circuit in September 2003, new IPv4 and IPv6 records were almost immediately established, between Geneva and Chicago first, then between Geneva, California and Arizona.
Indeed, a new IPv4 record was established on October 1 2003 by a team from Caltech and CERN with a single 5.44Gbps stream over the 7073 km path between Geneva and Chicago thus achieving the amazing result of 38.42 petabit-meters/second using Internet2 landspeed record (I2LSR) metrics (i.e. throughput x distance). This corresponds to the transfer of one 680MB CD in one second.
This new record was homologated by Internet2 on October 8, just in time for public announcement and award during the Internet2 Fall member meeting in Indianapolis and the Telecom World 2003 exhibition in Geneva.
Following the availability of a longer 10Gb/s path to Los Angeles (California) and Phoenix (Arizona) through Abilene, the US Universities backbone, and CALREN, the California Research and Education Network, the IPv4 and IPv6 records were substantially improved again with:
- 5.64Gb/s IPv4 over a 10949Km path between CERN and Los Angeles (CENIC PoP), i.e. 61.7 petabit-meters/second, established on November 62003 and officially awarded on November 20, 2003.
- 4 Gb/s IPv6 over a 11539 Km path between CERN and Phoenix (Caltech booth at SC2003) through Chicago and Los Angeles, i.e. 46.15 petabit-meters/second established on November 11, 2003 and officially awarded on December 19, 2003.
- 6.25Gb/s IPv4 multiple streams (8) over a 10949 Km path between CERN and Los Angeles (CENIC PoP), i.e. 68.431 petabit-meters/second, established on February 22, 2004 and officially awarded on March 6, 2004.
- 6.63Gbps IPv4 multiple streams (8) over a 15'776Km path between CERN and Los Angeles (CENIC PoP), i.e. 104529 petabit-meters/second, established on June 25, 2004 and officially awarded on July 8, 2004.