26 ms·
Record-breaking chip can transmit 1.8 petabits per second
- tmikaeld 4y agoAre these speeds just "tested" maximums or can they be utilized in practicality?
- rassibassi 4y agoNot practical yet, the novelty is the frequency comb which allows +200 channels across wavelength with only a single laser, where before one required 200 lasers. In an experiment like this, only the initial light source is modulated and therefore all channels carry the same data. The equipment for the transmitter and receiver chain is so expensive that university labs can barely afford one of each.
- cycomanic 4y agoAlmost correct. You typically need 2-4 transmitters to emulate the system. So you modulate one or two channels under test and modulate the rest of the band with a single modulator and use some decorrelation tricks to be realistic. Then you scan your channels under test through the whole band. This is in typically a lower bound of performance, i.e. a real system would likely perform better. As you said, using individual transmitters is economically unfeasible even for the best equipped industry labs.
- Dylan16807 4y agoDoes that mean "We experimentally demonstrate transmission of 1.84 Pbit s–1" in the paper abstract is a lie?
- henrikeh 4y agoI worked on this project and cycomanic summarizes the practice well. I’ve written more on it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33321506 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33321506
- Dylan16807 4y agoWell, the technology is just as impressive either way, but I think "we experimentally demonstrate transmission of 1.84 Pbit s–1" is misleading. The capacity was demonstrated piecewise but that data rate was not demonstrated.
- le-mark 4y agoIt says they transmit over a 37 core fiber, so 1.9 / 37 is about 53 terabits per second? Is it common for optical phys to encode/decode at this rate?
- Sporktacular 4y agoUnless I misunderstood, this is the number that matters. The 1+ Pb/s is like giving a headline grabbing statistic that highway can carry 10 million passengers per hour and then adding below that it's a 100 lane highway. The advancement seems that the de/multiplexing is done on a single module at each end.
- rassibassi 4y agoThey also multiplex across +200 channels across wavelength (wavelength division multiplexing). Not sure what the baud rate of a single channel was in their experiment but probably between 32-80Gb which is common for the lab equipment at Universities. The industry is knocking on 100-400Gb where for the actual decoding and signal processing there is massive parallelism applied to reduce the rate even more
- bell-cot 4y agoThe supporting circuitry & equipment - to get 1.84 petabits per second (Pbit/s) to & from the transmit/receive chips they demonstrated - will be a bit $$$extra...
- drfuchs 4y ago
- typeofhuman 4y agoSure it does. It says per-second. What is confusing about it?
- ouid 4y agoWhat are the units of internet traffic?
- mirekrusin 4y agoThey use Pbit/s in the article.
- robertlagrant 4y agoData volume transmitted per time increment.
- stjohnswarts 4y ago10000 libraries of congress per second.
- cynwoody 4y agoThe Library of Congress claims† to host 21 petabytes of digital content. That would take†† a little over a minute and a half to send over the link described in the article, assuming, of course, that the content has been put in a ready-to-send form. †https://www.loc.gov/programs/digital-collections-management/about-this-program/frequently-asked-questions/#:~:text=The%20Library%20of%20Congress'%20digital%20collections%20are%20dynamic%3B%20they%20continually,comprising%20914%20million%20unique%20files https://www.loc.gov/programs/digital-collections-management/.... ††https://www.google.com/search?q=21+petabytes+%2F+1.84+petabits&ie=UTF-8 https://www.google.com/search?q=21+petabytes+%2F+1.84+petabi...
- 4y ago
- tmaly 4y agoI want my 8k streaming video.
- Clent 4y agoIs it possible to calculate the maximum upper bound on the amount of data possible here?
- rassibassi 4y agoThe upper bound is still the Shannon limit. The experiment does a lot of multiplexing: spatial multi-core fiber, spectral multi channel multiplexing across wavelength, dual polarization. Each of the multiplexed channels are individually limited by the Shannon limit, and with higher power the fiber's Kerr effect creates interference which creates a sweet spot for the optimal optical launch power. the novelty here is that the spectral channels are all generated from a single laser source rather than a laser per channel
- igravious 4y ago^ Superb answer ^ | | Shannon Limit in Information Theory [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noisy-channel_coding_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noisy-channel_coding_theorem [2] https://news.mit.edu/2010/explained-shannon-0115 https://news.mit.edu/2010/explained-shannon-0115
- Vt71fcAqt7 4y ago>We also present a theoretical analysis that indicates that a single, chip-scale light source should be able to support 100 Pbit s–1 in massively parallel space-and-wavelength multiplexed data transmission systems.
- Dylan16807 4y agoIt depends on what you mean by "possible", what future improvements you're considering, because otherwise the answer is just 1.84 Pbit/s. But in very general, you have around 200THz of range for these infrared lasers. So on a single core, I'd expect the max to be within an order of magnitude of 200Tbps. They're using 37 cores, so they're getting 50Tbps per core right now. Order of magnitude because it's not super hard to approach a bit per Hz of bandwidth from the bottom side, though difficult at very high frequencies, while it gets exponentially hard to exceed it. And here's a couple relevant charts for how fiber is extra self-limiting: https://i.stack.imgur.com/bwTy2.png https://i.stack.imgur.com/bwTy2.png http://opticalcloudinfra.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/Nonlinear-Shannon-Limit-per-SOP-Post-036.png http://opticalcloudinfra.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/Nonl...
- jpmattia 4y agoI have not dug deeply into the technical content, but the headline as written is pretty far off the mark. I believe the press release is here: https://www.dtu.dk/english/news/all-news/new-data-transmission-record?id=213f1735-036d-44c9-b229-d25d74dd3f02 https://www.dtu.dk/english/news/all-news/new-data-transmissi... The innovation: Normally, data over a fiber is multiplexed using many wavelengths of light (wave-division multiplexing, or WDM for short). These wavelengths are generated from an array of lasers, forming a frequency comb. The result here creates a frequency comb from a single laser, and uses that for the transmission. It saves all the power associated with the many lasers traditionally used for WDM. All the "chips" that do the modulation, transmission, reception, and de-modulation are still there, but you've cut out all but one laser from the system. It's a nice result. That was my quick take, please correct if you have more info.
- Vt71fcAqt7 4y agoThe key point is the petabit per second rate they achieved: >Using only a single light source, scientists have set a world record by transmitting 1.8 petabits per second. In 2021 the world record was 300 TB[0]. Why is the headline misleading? for reference, the headline is currently "Record-breaking chip can transmit entire internet's traffic per second." This seems to be correct: >According to a study from global telecommunications market research and consulting firm TeleGeography, global internet bandwidth has risen by 28% over the course of 2022, with a four-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 29%, and is now standing at 997Tbps (terabits per second).[1] >Normally, data over a fiber is multiplexed using many wavelengths of light (wave-division multiplexing, or WDM for short). These wavelengths are generated from an array of lasers, forming a frequency comb. I think that is a relativly new techniuque. For example see https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-14010-7 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-14010-7 : >Optical frequency combs were originally conceived for establishing comparisons between atomic clocks1 and as a tool to synthesize optical frequencies2,3, but they are also becoming an attractive light source for coherent fiber-optical communications, where they can replace the hundreds of lasers used to carry digital data So "normally" might give the wrong impression. As far as I know, no commercial service is using it. One reason is the cost, which this article addresses by proposing a chip based apporach which makes it cheaper and easier. [0]https://www.nict.go.jp/en/press/2021/07/12-1.html https://www.nict.go.jp/en/press/2021/07/12-1.html [1]https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252524883/New-networking-era-imminent-as-global-internet-bandwidth-rises-28-in-2022 https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252524883/New-networking... Edit: I should point out that the "previous" record was with a 4-core optical fiber, whereas this one uses a 37 core one. They are really two different things: one about the cable and the other about the transmitter. So this one doesn't "beat" the other.
- traviskeens 4y agogreat news in theory, but in practice, problems remain; chiefly, that google analytics & hubspot still reduce this to 0.9MB/s
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- metadat 4y agoAlso discussed 2 days ago: Chip can transmit all of the internet's traffic every second https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33296750 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33296750 (56 points, 17 comments)
- jl6 4y agoWhat does “entire internet’s traffic” really mean? There isn’t one single measurement point through which all traffic flows, so what set of connections are they measuring? Maybe traffic between BGP peers?
- dmitrygr 4y agoTraffic is amount per second. "traffic per second" is amount per second^2. What does it mean for a chip to "transfer an mount per second^2" ?
- Sohcahtoa82 4y agoI think it's pretty obvious what was meant by the title and you're disguising pedantry as confusion. It's poorly worded, sure, I'll give you that. But anyone should be able to understand that what they meant was "The internet on average transfers a certain amount of data per second, and this chip is capable of transferring at that rate."
- Dylan16807 4y ago> I think it's pretty obvious what was meant by the title and you're disguising pedantry as confusion. I think it's pretty obvious it was a challenge, not a display of fake confusion.
- Zenst 4y agoI'm eventually foreseeing a whole new form of cache. A coil of optical fiber with the cache data constantly inflight around that loop. With denser optical data transmissions the amount of data per meter of coil starts increasing. At this speed, we are already talking 2% of the entire Internet traffic in the length of a single fiber between the shortest point between the UK and USA. That's just a single fiber. As transducers of this ability get cheaper and cheaper, all those unused dark fibers start to offer up alternative uses with inflight-caches. Think of how much memory would be needed to store that amount of data, how much that costs and even with the costs of fiber, things would start.
- achr2 4y agoEverything old is new again - delay line memory at the speed of light.
- colechristensen 4y ago1/1.4 * the speed of light :) Moves a bit slower in glass fiber.
- adgjlsfhk1 4y agoif you want to be pedantic, it is the speed of light. Just not the speed of light in vacuum :)
- Dylan16807 4y agoI don't really agree. If you say "the" speed of light and don't make other qualifications, that means c.
- WASDx 4y agoReminds me of https://github.com/yarrick/pingfs https://github.com/yarrick/pingfs
- oefnak 4y agoReminds me of the harderdrive based on the ping protocol: https://youtu.be/JcJSW7Rprio https://youtu.be/JcJSW7Rprio
- noobermin 4y agoGreat now webdevs will get even more lazy and ship an entire docker image in every html tag.
- tpmx 4y agoPlease don't give them ideas...
- datavirtue 4y agoIt's an old idea called: object oriented programming.
- TOMDM 4y ago"The user needs to be able to edit some audio in the browser" Next thing you know, you have linux compiled to WASM running a docker container built to host ffmpeg for you.
- thesandlord 4y agohttps://github.com/ffmpegwasm/ffmpeg.wasm https://github.com/ffmpegwasm/ffmpeg.wasm
- hinkley 4y agoWell it's too late to switch to that now. We've already built all this other infrastructure to run it in a docker container which is more secure anyway.
- booleandilemma 4y agoIt gives the <img> tag a whole new meaning.
- hedora 4y agoThis is cool, but note that it's only enough to feed the floating point units on about 1000 consumer grade GPUs. I know cloud is all the rage and stuff, but the thing that really surprised me from the article is at how (relatively) slow the internet backbone is.
- hnuser123456 4y agoI'm guessing you're talking VRAM bandwidth, which is just over 1 TB/s on a 4090, while the "internet backbone" is apparently ~1 Pb/s, lowercase B, so actually only 128 4090s have the memory bandwidth to match the internet backbone. Of course, they would fill up in 0.2 ms, at only 24GB each running in parallel.
- hedora 4y agoThose are over $2K. I meant "normal" consumer grade stuff in the $200-$400 range, as opposed to "enthusiast" stuff. Either way, it's no more than a few racks of server-grade GPUs, which is probably where applications would actually want 1PBit/sec of VRAM bandwidth.
- jedberg 4y agoHow do they generate data at that rate to transmit? I assume it's synthetic data and probably duplicated a lot? But how do they generate it and receive it to count it?
- jpmattia 4y ago> How do they generate data at that rate to transmit? In the lab, the most common scenario is to have a pseudo-random bit sequence (PRBS), and usually the sequence is 2^31-1 bits long. This makes both the generation (on the transmit side) and error-rate detection (on the receive side) reasonably straightforward, although it can be tricky to read out every one of the receive channels to check the bit-error rate (BER). Here's typical PRBS BER equipment: https://www.anritsu.com/en-us/test-measurement/products/mp1900a https://www.anritsu.com/en-us/test-measurement/products/mp19... Spoiler alert: The test equipment isn't cheap. Edit: Probably should mention- PRBS from a linear-feedback shift register is used, because in a PRBS of 2^N-1 you are guaranteed every permutation of N bits long, except for N x zeroes in a row. This measures the wideband system, so if there are spurious resonances in the wide pass band, errors will result.
- showerst 4y agoAs someone who's become a bit of a test equipment nerd, that is _very_ neat.
- cycomanic 4y agoActually, we tend not to use PRBSs anymore for these sort of experiments, instead you use a randomly generated symbol/bit sequence which fits into the memory of the DAC. Similarly you don't use a BERT anymore but instead use a Realtime oscilloscope (even more expensive than the BERTs) and do offline digital signal processing (in real systems this is done by very expensive asics). PRBSs and BERTs are still uses in so called datacom experiments where latency is often an issue and only very lightweight FEC is used, so one wants to measure down to error rates of 10e-9 unlike coherent systems.
- jpmattia 4y ago
- superkuh 4y agoRadio astronomy always needs more bandwidth. International arrays like LOFAR or the SKA pathfinders generate a comparable amount of information/second as the entire internet. They could definitely benefit from small scale production of extremely high bandwidth optical networking components.
- walrus01 4y agothe main problem with massive data transfer from radio astronomy sites to other places is not throughput in fiber, but economically purchasing transport capacity from carrier-of-carrier ISPs to get it from the place where the radio telescopes are at, to various research labs and datacenters. radio telescopes tend to be located in very remote places with very few dedicated dark fiber options. from the perspective of somebody in the ISP business, go try to buy a 100GbE transport circuit from $random_radio_astronomy_telescope_site to a meet-me room/traffic exchange point at a major internet infrastructure site.... you're going to run into economic problems really quick.
- superkuh 4y agoI was thinking more interconnects between the FFT/channelizer/correlation boards and the storage that are currently 100 GbE or the like. But now that I think about it it's probably not the interconnect cost that limits things, but storage.
- ccbccccbbcccbb 4y agoSo, will the life of an average dweller of the Earth become happier because of this?
- petercooper 4y agoFor reference, the global internet bandwidth has been estimated at just shy of 1 Pbit/s The entire Internet is using the same as 1 million residential 1 gigabit connections could max out? I don't know why, but that sounds far below what I would have expected.
- smolder 4y agoI wonder how that estimate was made. Maybe they are counting it as one transmission when something non-unique is broadcast to many endpoints? Or does every fetch of an asset from a CDN count? Either way, the bulk of the web is structured to put data as close to where it's needed as possible, to keep things quick and uncongested. So, it doesn't surprise me that internet backbones are much thinner than the aggregate of last mile connections.
- hinkley 4y agoI went to a five alarm fire in Seattle once. It started in the late afternoon. Pillar of black smoke into the sky. The fire was still going after sunset. The interesting thing about a five alarm fire is that it turns out that it takes about 10 fire trucks to run 5 hoses. The city water system, like the Internet, is designed to deliver a certain amount of volume per day, and to be able to move a reasonable amount of it to arbitrary locations, but not a large fraction of its total capacity to one spot. A city hydrant can't keep up with multiple fire hoses, even with a pumper truck there to give it enough pressure to go onto the fire. So what you have to do is daisy chain trucks, hooking trucks up to hydrants on separate water mains, or opposite ends of the same loop, then pump that water to another truck that pumps it onto the fire. You can't overbuild capacity without passing those costs on to customers, so you do what you can to keep the system working smoothly and have workarounds for situations where the abstraction leaks, like a once a decade five alarm fire, or an Internet Hug of Death.
- yieldcrv 4y agoAnybody here following photonic or optical processors closely?
- henrikeh 4y agoLate to the thread, but I took part of this research (7th author in the list). I worked on the signal processing, information coding etc and is happy to answer any questions :-)
- rglover 4y agoWhat do you think the time lag is for this actually being deployed in a non-research context (either small scale or full-blown rollout)?
- henrikeh 4y agoWrote another reply here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33321669 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33321669 I’d say that there is at least a 10 year delay between the lab and commercial deployment. Even then we are talking about deployment in large fiber systems and not to the home. However, not all ideas in the lab ever make it into deployment.
- randcraw 4y agoDoes this work imply that the same tech could create ultra-high-speed switches that could match this bandwidth, thereby routing and propagating, and not just flow between two points? BTW, congrats on your success.
- henrikeh 4y agoThanks :-) It is a while since I have been into optical signal processing, but I will ask my colleague who is much more well-versed.
- lancewiggs 4y agoThe short answer is yes. (1) Optical saves a heck of a lot of power, and is obviously much faster than copper, so that's the way it's all going. The longer answer requires reliable and appropriately sized/cost transceivers to get the data back to electrical to match the speed of the optical, and those are going to be a while coming, and this tech is still in the lab. At the top end subsea cables have very high cost and traditionally bulky transceivers, and it's all about data volume, not switching. At the other end of the scale is inside the data centre, where most switching needs to occur, there is a move towards optical interconnections and co-packaged switches. (1 and 2) 1: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/newsroom/news/intel-demonstrates-industry-first-co-packaged-optics-ethernet-switch.html#gs.g3h8as https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/newsroom/news/intel-... 2: https://www.intel.in/content/www/in/en/architecture-and-technology/silicon-photonics/silicon-photonics-overview.html https://www.intel.in/content/www/in/en/architecture-and-tech...
- npongratz 4y agoAnd 21.5 years ago, we were (or at least, I was) celebrating mere multi-terabit photonic switching: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/01/04/23/1233235/multiterabit-switching-no-moving-parts https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/01/04/23/1233235/multite...
- ksec 4y ago> the researchers claim that it could eventually reach eye-watering speeds of up to 100 Pbit/s We have no ceiling in sight in terms of optical bandwidth improvements. The cost of bandwidth continues to go down, we have roadmaps showing this will continue for at least another 10 years if not 20. And if we are optimistic, including the tickle down effect into consumers we are easily looking at 30 years of improvement. But that is bandwidth. I hope more research goes into latency, Speed of light in "C" rather than glass fiber 2/3 of C.