Transmission Mismatch

Recent advances in optical transport technologies have created a radical mismatch in networking between the optical transmission world and the electrical forwarding/routing world. Today, a single strand of optical fiber can transmit more traffic than the entire Internet core. However, end-systems with Data Intensive Applications do not have access to this abundant bandwidth. Furthermore, even though disk costs are attractively inexpensive, the feasibility of transmitting huge amounts of data is limited. The encumbrance lies in the limited transmission ability of Layer 3 (L3) architecture. In the OSI model, L3 provides switching and routing technologies, mainly as packet switching, creating logical paths known as virtual circuits for transmission of data from node to node. L3 cannot effectively transmit PetaBytes or hundreds of Terabytes, and has impeding limitations in providing service to our targeted e-Science applications. Disk transfer speed is fundamentally slower than the network. For very large data sets, access time is insignificant and remote memory access is faster than local disk access.