CERN Accelerating science

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Significant improvements have been achieved this year with the deployment of TEN-155, the new 155 Mbps pan-European backbone interconnecting the National Research Networks (NRN). CERN is sharing a 155 Mbps access point with SWITCH, the Swiss NRN and has a guaranteed bandwidth of 40 Mbps, 5 times more than what we had in 1998 on the TEN-34 backbone.

Another major milestone was achieved in April with the re-deployment of our dedicated transatlantic line from MCI/Perryman to C&W/Chicago, whilst simultaneously increasing the capacity from 4Mbps to 12Mbps initially then 20Mbps by August 1999. Very soon, CERN will connect from its Point of Presence in Chicago to the Intercontinental Internet Exchange Point in Chicago, sponsored by the US National Science Foundation and known as STARTAP (Science Technology and Research Transit Access Point). This will give us direct access to a number of US, Canadian and Asia-Pacific networks such as ESnet, vBNS, Internet2/Abilene, Canarie and Transpac.

Our transatlantic connectivity is organized through a consortium led by CERN, with IN2P3, WHO, US and Canada HEP communities through Caltech and Carleton University.

Thanks to exceptional circumstances causing the price/bandwidth ratio to drop very significantly, the above upgrades could be achieved at approximately constant budget levels. The result is that we now start to have adequate capacity for all normal CERN requirements, in particular for exporting sizeable amounts of physics data all over the world, in a coordinated and controlled manner. Further improvements are expected next year.

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