BCNET and Canarie demonstrate massive high speed network

BCNET, which is British Columbia's advanced network and shared IT services organization for higher education, along with Canarie (Canada's Advanced Research and Innovation Network)  and University of Victoria demonstrated the future of high speed connectivity this week.

In just 24 hours they successfully transmitted one petabyte of particle physics data over an optical connection. Speeds of 95 gigabits per second were sustained for the period. to put this into perspective one petabyte of data is the equivalent of 13 years of HDTV Video!

The event was a feature of SC11, an international super computing conference currently being held in Seattle. 

“The demonstration provides a preview into the future of digital infrastructure in British Columbia, and our flexibility to build one of the world's fastest and most advanced networks to further accelerate our competitiveness in science and technology," said BCNET President and CEO Michael Hrybyk. "BCNET's road-map to 100Gbps is currently underway in order to satisfy the burgeoning demand for applications and services that rely on our network and the collaborative needs of our research and higher education members.''

1 petabyte equals the space of 10,000 laptops, each with a 100 GB hard drive, on which you could store approximately one of the following:

• 13.3 years of HD-TV video
• 10 million yards of books on a shelf   
• 20,000,000 four-drawer filing cabinets filled with text 
• 250 million mp3 songs 

If you could maintain 100 gigabits download speed per second at home, you could download 6 movies per second!