Record-breaking chip can transmit 1.8 petabits per second

I have not dug deeply into the technical content, but the headline as written is pretty far off the mark.<p>I believe the press release is here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dtu.dk&#x2F;english&#x2F;news&#x2F;all-news&#x2F;new-data-transmission-record?id=213f1735-036d-44c9-b229-d25d74dd3f02" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dtu.dk&#x2F;english&#x2F;news&#x2F;all-news&#x2F;new-data-transmissi...</a><p>The innovation: Normally, data over a fiber is multiplexed using many wavelengths of light (wave-division multiplexing, or WDM for short). These wavelengths are generated from an array of lasers, forming a frequency comb.<p>The result here creates a frequency comb from a single laser, and uses that for the transmission. It saves all the power associated with the many lasers traditionally used for WDM. All the &quot;chips&quot; that do the modulation, transmission, reception, and de-modulation are still there, but you&#x27;ve cut out all but one laser from the system. It&#x27;s a nice result.<p>That was my quick take, please correct if you have more info.

I&#x27;m eventually foreseeing a whole new form of cache. A coil of optical fiber with the cache data constantly inflight around that loop. With denser optical data transmissions the amount of data per meter of coil starts increasing.<p>At this speed, we are already talking 2% of the entire Internet traffic in the length of a single fiber between the shortest point between the UK and USA. That&#x27;s just a single fiber. As transducers of this ability get cheaper and cheaper, all those unused dark fibers start to offer up alternative uses with inflight-caches. Think of how much memory would be needed to store that amount of data, how much that costs and even with the costs of fiber, things would start.

Late to the thread, but I took part of this research (7th author in the list). I worked on the signal processing, information coding etc and is happy to answer any questions :-)

Great now webdevs will get even more lazy and ship an entire docker image in every html tag.

How do they generate data at that rate to transmit? I assume it&#x27;s synthetic data and probably duplicated a lot? But how do they generate it and receive it to count it?

Also discussed 2 days ago:<p><i>Chip can transmit all of the internet&#x27;s traffic every second</i><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=33296750" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=33296750</a><p>(56 points, 17 comments)

Radio astronomy always needs more bandwidth. International arrays like LOFAR or the SKA pathfinders generate a comparable amount of information&#x2F;second as the entire internet. They could definitely benefit from small scale production of extremely high bandwidth optical networking components.

This is cool, but note that it&#x27;s only enough to feed the floating point units on about 1000 consumer grade GPUs.<p>I know cloud is all the rage and stuff, but the thing that really surprised me from the article is at how (relatively) slow the internet backbone is.

great news in theory, but in practice, problems remain; chiefly, that google analytics &amp; hubspot still reduce this to 0.9MB&#x2F;s

And 21.5 years ago, we were (or at least, I was) celebrating mere multi-terabit photonic switching:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hardware.slashdot.org&#x2F;story&#x2F;01&#x2F;04&#x2F;23&#x2F;1233235&#x2F;multiterabit-switching-no-moving-parts" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hardware.slashdot.org&#x2F;story&#x2F;01&#x2F;04&#x2F;23&#x2F;1233235&#x2F;multite...</a>

<i>For reference, the global internet bandwidth has been estimated at just shy of 1 Pbit&#x2F;s</i><p>The <i>entire</i> Internet is using the same as 1 million residential 1 gigabit connections could max out? I don&#x27;t know why, but that sounds far below what I would have expected.

&gt; the researchers claim that it could eventually reach eye-watering speeds of up to 100 Pbit&#x2F;s<p>We have no ceiling in sight in terms of optical bandwidth improvements. The cost of bandwidth continues to go down, we have roadmaps showing this will continue for at least another 10 years if not 20. And if we are optimistic, including the tickle down effect into consumers we are easily looking at 30 years of improvement.<p>But that is bandwidth. I hope more research goes into latency, Speed of light in &quot;C&quot; rather than glass fiber 2&#x2F;3 of C.

What does “entire internet’s traffic” really mean? There isn’t one single measurement point through which all traffic flows, so what set of connections are they measuring? Maybe traffic between BGP peers?

Is it possible to calculate the maximum upper bound on the amount of data possible here?

The supporting circuitry &amp; equipment - to get 1.84 petabits per second (Pbit&#x2F;s) to &amp; from the transmit&#x2F;receive chips they demonstrated - will be a bit $$$extra...

It says they transmit over a 37 core fiber, so 1.9 &#x2F; 37 is about 53 terabits per second? Is it common for optical phys to encode&#x2F;decode at this rate?

Are these speeds just &quot;tested&quot; maximums or can they be utilized in practicality?

Anybody here following photonic or optical processors closely?

Traffic is amount per second. &quot;traffic per second&quot; is amount per second^2.<p>What does it mean for a chip to &quot;transfer an mount per second^2&quot; ?

I want my 8k streaming video.

So, will the life of an average dweller of the Earth become happier because of this?