CERN - European Organization for Nuclear Research - Press Office

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Innovating for Tomorrow

CERN*, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is teaming up with the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and the University of Geneva in demonstrating technology of the future on the Lake Geneva Region stand at Telecom World 2003.

From the Web to the Grid

The World Wide Web was invented at CERN to help scientists around the world to communicate. Now CERN is in the vanguard of a new computing technology called the Grid. Where the Web used the Internet to revolutionise information sharing, the Grid is set to do the same for sharing computing resources for data analysis and problem solving in a wide range of scientific applications, from earth observation to bio-medicine. A "Grid café" portal at Telecom will introduce this new concept for global computing.

Frontier telecommunications technology

For two decades CERN has pushed telecommunications technology to its limits in order to run its machines and experiments and to distribute data. The laboratory has a track record of showing innovative techniques at Telecom five years in advance of their use in more general applications. The aim at ITU Telecom World 2003 is to show leading developments for the future. At the exhibition CERN will highlight advances in networking through optical fibres in various demonstrations, including:

• A new land speed long-range data transmission record, well above 2.5 gigabit/second
• High-speed, high quality videoconferencing over IP
• Live transmission between ITU Telecom World 2003 and the Internet 2 conference in Indianapolis
• Further high-speed demonstrations including new communications protocols

Activites on the stand

• Land Speed Record
  CERN & Caltech will demonstrate multi-Gigabit/second file transfers between Palexpo and Chicago with a possible extension to Los Angeles. The main purpose is to establish new land speed records, breaking the existing record of 2.38 Gb/s by a factor two at least, and also to demonstrate alternative transport protocols such as FAST, Grid DT, Scalable TCP and high speed TCP.
• Joint sessions with Internet2 fall member meeting in Indianapolis
  Wednesday, 15th October (14:30 – 16:00) : Direct participation in the Performance Engineering session. Thursday 16th October (13:00 - 14:30): Panel discussion with Doug van Houweling, CEO of Internet2/UCAID in the US, and participants at Palexpo. Award Ceremony for the Internet2 Landspeed Record (17:30).
• Advanced Photonic Networking
  This demo between Northwestern University and CERN will also showcase SABUL/VDT as an alternative to traditional TCP-based transport solutions (Monday, Tuesday).
• VRVS - will be used by all of the above demos
  VRVS (Virtual Room Videoconferencing System) is a high quality videoconferencing system than runs over IP networks. It features flexible(Virtual Room Videoconferencing System) and immediate availability for conference scheduling through the virtual rooms function. VRVS will also be demonstrated separately on Thursday and Friday with active participation from several sites worldwide.
• MONALISA
  A scalable dynamic realtime global monitoring system, developed by Caltech, will be used to visualize the high speed trans-Atlantic data traffic.
• Demonstration of the GRID for Physics Analysis
  Grid analysis demo between Caltech, CERN, KEK (Japan), Sinica (Taiwan), NUST (Pakistan), UERJ (Rio de Janeiro), PUB (Bucharest).
• 10 Gigabit/second Trans-Atlantic Communications Testbed
  On behalf of the EU DataTAG Project, the 10 Gb/s trans-Atlantic testbed will be physically extended to Palexpo. Thanks to various sponsors this extended testbed should be the largest distributed 10 Gigabit Ethernet deployment demonstrated so far.
• 10 Gigabit per second Ethernet to Canada
  Demonstrations of 10 Gigabit Ethernet between CERN and Canada on another 10 Gb/s path through Amsterdam and Chicago will also be attempted. These demos should nicely complement the Caltech, CERN, Northwestern University demos.

READ MORE ON ' THE GRID ' HERE!!

* CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, has its headquarters in Geneva. At present, its Member States are Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, the Slovak Republic, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. India, Israel, Japan, the Russian Federation, the United States of America, Turkey, the European Commission and UNESCO have observer status.