IP: "Will The Internet Survive" IBM and the Olympics?

[Dave Farber <farber@central.cis.upenn.edu>]

Date: Mon, 15 Jul 1996 22:17:25 +0900
To: farber@central.cis.upenn.edu
From: ajp@glocom.ac.jp (Adam Peake)




Transcript from INET96 plenary session, "Will The Internet Survive".


Vint Cerf asks John Patrick, Vice President, Internet Service, IBM:


"Will IBM's involvement in providing information from the
Olympic Games kill the net as a result?"




John Patrick:  I don't think so, we do get this question
everyday. I must admit .  What's going on in Atlanta very
shortly as I'm sure you're aware is that 10,700 athletes are
going to participate in events and each time one of them
crosses over a finish line there's a Swatch timing system which
will gather that transaction and it will then be collected by
80 local area networks and 7000 PCs that will then provide that
information to a group of mainframes and create this results
database which the commentators will be speaking with us all
about on television but which will also be fed into one of our
super computers to deliver to the Internet.  And, the concern
of course is, is that going to sink the Internet.  We don't
think so.  We are working very hard to engineer this in a way
that this significant amount of data will be distributed as
evenly as possible.  We have 4 T3s tied into that supercomputer
which in turn tie back into 4 different NAPs.  We also have 5
geographic sites tied in so we will be scaling geographically,
scaling vertically within the nodes of the supercomputer and
scaling across the Internet itself by adding significant
capacity to the net, trying to be a good Internet citizen here
in balancing that load across multiple NAPs.


So we think the net of all this will be basically less than
when Netscape goes on the Net everyday.


Cerf: that sounds like a new measure of load on the Net "how
many Netscapes are you handling?"


END