Perdue uses Xserve RAID

Apple technology was used for storage and data transfer in Purdue University's historic internet data transfer project. "HugeTube," the project's nickname, is possibly the largest uncompressed video streamed over the internet, according to InformationWeek. The project may be the prelude to delivery of digital motion pictures to movie theaters, according to Perdue officials. "The 2-minute, 10-gigabyte scientific animation of the cell structure of a bacterium was streamed at a rate of 7.5 Gbps, achieving a peak transfer rate of 8.4 Gbps. That's sufficient to send 12 DVD movies in the same period of time. Researchers used six Apple's Xserve RAID storage technology connected via six Apple FibreChannel cards to six dual Opteron servers with PCI-x buses, provided by Advanced Clustering Technologies. The total cost of the project equipment was less than $100,000, according to the report. The demo took place at the SC06 Conference in Tampa, Fla., as part of the conference's High Performance Computing Bandwidth Challenge, which explored various uses for a 10-gigabit network.

by MacNN Staff