However, this is being led by a government with an agenda, a university group with a mission and a science user base with a passion, so it could well come to pass.
#Wpd viewer mac install#
A dark fibre network costs money to install and maintain but doesn't include those additional charges. Telecom will also, not coincidentally, be able to charge accordingly. Voice requires a different kind of network to video conferencing or online gaming or TV, for example. It's a smart network that allows Telecom to manage all the connections so as to optimise them for different tasks. Telecom is spending a billion dollars building a new network with all the smarts it can pack in, which is exactly the opposite of this dark fibre network. Telcos don't like giving away their fibre like that, though. No conditioning, no management, just the fibre. Dark fibre is, as the name suggests, just the fibre. The problem is the network team want dark fibre - untouched by telcos' billing systems. Dense wave division multiplexing is the name of the game and it means cables like the Southern Cross Cable, connecting New Zealand with Australia, Fiji and the US, can double its capacity every few years. Clever use of the electronics at either end of the cable splits the beam of light into small wavelengths, giving you more capacity from the same lines. It has a relatively long lifespan and you don't have to dig it up to increase its carrying capacity. There are choke points, the Cook Strait for example, but generally there's a lot of it about and not all of it is owned by the telcos. Contrary to popular belief, New Zealand has quite a lot of fibre already in the ground. The key to building such a network is fibre optic cable. It's quite an underwhelming sight - just rack-mounted boxes with little lights on the front. In Auckland that's traditionally been the Sky Tower, where various bits of network gear sit humming quietly to themselves. These points of presence are basically a rack of servers and switches stored in a cupboard somewhere handy to the network.
#Wpd viewer mac series#
A series of 15 points of presence will be established around the country, connected potentially by a dark fibre network. All the country's universities and some of the crown research institutes are getting together with the government to build an advanced network in New Zealand. Enter the Ministry of Research, Science and Technology's Advanced Network project. Sending half a terabyte of traffic to a New Zealand account needs a connection that is fast and cheap, and telcos typically aren't keen. The US Library of Congress is said to hold 20TB of text. To put it in perspective, the average video store holds around 8TB of movies. That's right, that's how far behind our scientists are if they try to interact with overseas counterparts. Foster worked out how long it would take to send half a terabyte to Wellington at New Zealand's rates - 500 years.
From his office he can send half a terabyte (500 gigabytes) to Switzerland in less than half an hour. He sent a 1MB (megabyte) file to Wellington and it took four hours to get there. Foster was coming out to New Zealand earlier this year for a conference.
#Wpd viewer mac Pc#
He's one of the world's foremost experts on grid computing, sharing resources among thousands of PC users. I made contact this week with Ian Foster, a Kiwi and professor of computer science in Chicago. The pipes are there, but the telcos charge for each megabyte sent or received. This country does not have an advanced network that will allow scientific communities to share these tremendous data at the price researchers can afford. New Zealand scientists, unfortunately, need not apply. Cheap processing power and international telecommunications traffic capacity have come together to provide scientists with the tools they need to unlock the secrets of the universe. Today's scientists are able to make tremendous leaps of understanding, far more than their predecessors, for one simple reason: they can share knowledge on a level undreamed of in years gone by. Instead you will have to wait for several months for a stack of CDs to be sent out or perhaps you will just abandon that area of research.
#Wpd viewer mac download#
You can't download the latest version of the genome because it would take all day, tying up both the computer resources and network capacity - not to mention your entire budget in bandwidth costs. You might be studying the works of Chaucer or high energy physics or something to do with the human genome or biotechnology. Imagine for a moment you're a researcher at a university in New Zealand.
0 kommentar(er)
