Software to streamline data submission

2003/05/01 Elhuyar Zientzia Iturria: Elhuyar aldizkaria

• Softwarea

They have prepared a software capable of emitting 8 gigabytes per second. That is, 153,000 times more than conventional modem and almost 6,000 times faster than simple ADSL. The new software, called FAST, uses the usual data transmission mechanisms, but reacts more smoothly to congestion signals. The TCP/IP protocol, the Internet transmission protocol, determines the congestion of the routes according to the errors received by the issuer and subsequently drastically reduces the speed.

FAST, for its part, measures the level of congestion according to the time interval between the message of sending and receiving information. If time increases, the speed decreases slightly. In this way, researchers have managed to substantially improve data transmission efficiency. After spending an hour sending data between California and the CERN center in Geneva, they reached an average speed of 925 gigabytes under normal conditions. Almost four times faster than TCP/IP. The record was reached with 10 lines at a time. The software has been developed at the California Institute of Technology.