In Net Attitude, there is a chapter with a lot of discussion about “Fast”. The world record for high-speed network applications has jumped by a factor of more than five since the book was released in late 2001. At last week’s Supercomputing 2002 conference there was an application with a peak data transfer rate of 16.8 billion bits per second, more than 30,000 times faster than a typical home connection of 56,000 bits per second. Mike Nelson at IBM was at the Super Computing 2002 conference in Baltimore and saw a demo from one of the “Bandwidth Challenge” entrants. They were able to generate massive, high-resolution graphical images on a system 3,000 miles away at Lawrence Livermore and get the same performance as if the software was running on a PC at the conference.

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