ACADEMIA

Washington, DC--The University of Oregon, the Oregon Gigapop and NYSERNet, a New York-based not-for-profit leading-edge networking organization, have set the first record for Internet performance using IPv6, the next generation Internet protocol, as part of the ongoing Internet2 Land Speed Record (I2-LSR) competition. By transferring 3.47 gigabytes over 3000 miles (4810 km) of network from Eugene, Oregon to Syracuse, New York in one hour, the team set an I2-LSR IPv6 category record of 39.81 terabit meters per second. The mark was established in the course of an ongoing project that uses IPv6 to transfer over 60 gigabytes of Internet newsgroup data between the institutions each day. "We're delighted that the staff of the University of Oregon Computing Center and the Oregon Gigapop had the opportunity to collaborate with our colleagues at NYSERNet, as well as the staff of Abilene, the staff of the Indiana network operations center, and the Internet2 End-to-End Performance Initiative on this groundbreaking project," noted Joanne Hugi, Associate Vice President, Information Services at the University of Oregon. "There's no question that routine delivery of real-world production information services of this sort is the best tangible proof that native IPv6 service stands ready to meet the current and emerging needs of the higher education high performance networking community." "In just the past year we have seen dramatic progress in the availability and maturity of IPv6 networking," said Tim Lance, President of NYSERNet. "The connection between NYSERNet and the University of Oregon changed from a set of hand-configured tunnels to a fully native path across the Abilene backbone network that is approaching the same performance as the IPv4 network. Now that we have a transcontinental network supporting IPv4 and IPv6 over the same infrastructure, we believe the time has come for us to deploy real applications over IPv6 and work with our members to make it a reality on their campuses." "As the first record-setters in the IPv6 category of the Internet2 Land Speed Record, NYSERNet, the University of Oregon, and the Oregon Gigapop have provided an important demonstration of IPv6's readiness to support day-to-day network applications," said Rich Carlson, network research scientist at Argonne National Laboratory, and chair of the I2-LSR judging panel. Internet2 Land Speed Record entries are judged on a combination of how much bandwidth they use and how much distance they cover end-to-end, using standard Internet (TCP/IP) protocols. The Internet2 Land Speed Record is an open and ongoing competition. Details of the winning entries, complete rules, submission guidelines and additional information is available at: http://www.internet2.edu/html/i2lsr.shtml