An international group of scientists and engineers have broken the world network speed record for the third consecutive year. The team consists of physicists, computer scientists, and network engineers from the California Institute of Technology, the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, Fermilab, CERN, and the University of Michigan, and includes partners at the University of Florida, the Brookhaven National Lab, Vanderbilt University as well as international participants at the University of Manchester and UKLight in the United Kingdom, Rio de Janeiro State University, UERJ and the State Universities of São Paulo, USP and UNESP in Brazil, Kyungpook National University and KISTI in Korea and the KEK Laboratory in Tsukuba, Japan.
The record was broken during the SuperComputing 2005 Bandwidth Challenge at a demonstration that achieved a peak throughput of 151 Gbps and recorded an official mark of 131.6 Gbps which was measured by the Bandwidth Challenge judges on 17 of 22 fiber optic links used by the team. This beat their previous record of 101 Gbps peak by 50 percent. Breaking it down in terms that we can all understand, this would be the equivalent of serving 10,000 MPEG2 HDTV movies simultaneously in real time or transmitting all of the printed material in the Library of Congress in 10 minutes.