The growth of international collaboration in science was underlined last December by the award of a contract to Dutch telecoms provider KPNQuest for a new transatlantic high-speed data link at 622 Mbps, to replace the existing two 155 Mbps links.
Connecting CERN to StarLightTM, the optical component of the STAR TAPTM Internet exchange in Chicago, the new link will be funded by a consortium of the French particle and nuclear physics institute (IN2P3), the US Department of Energy and National Science Foundation, the Canadian high-energy physics community, the World Health Organization and CERN. Research users of transatlantic networking should start to notice the benefits from April 2002.
A second very-high-performance data link operating at 2.5 Gbps, also connecting CERN to StarLightTM, is expected to be ordered soon. This is part of the European Union-funded DataTAG (research & technological development for a transatlantic Grid) project, in collaboration with the Department of Energy and National Science Foundation. It will form an important part of the network for the Large Hadron Collider computing Grid.
Optical cables at Chicago’s StarLightTM Internet exchange. StarLight is the emerging optical component of the National Science Foundation-funded STAR TAPTM international interconnection point for advanced research and education networks. (Electronic Visualization Laboratory, University of Illinois, Chicago.)
