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n-1-3-012.82a
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N-1-3-012.82, "Europe - HEPnet", by Brian Carpenter,
<brian@dxcern.cern.ch>, and Francois Fluckiger,
<fluckiger@vxcern.cern.ch>
HEPnet is the collection of lines, equipment and services partially or
totally funded and operated by the European High Energy Physics (HEP)
community for its 5,000 physicists and their support staff. It
provides a range of services supported in collaboration by operational
staff from major HEP institutes. HEPnet in Europe may be compared to
the US Department of Energy's ESnet, although limited to particle
physics.
HEPnet was set up in response to very specific requirements of the
community, such as the need for direct lines of fixed and guaranteed
high bandwidth between major laboratories and data processing centres,
or very short network latencies to support advanced distributed
processing applications. It is thus complementary to HEP use of
general-purpose research network infrastructure.
The basic infrastructure relies on a set of point to point
international leased lines between HEP institutes. In several cases,
these leased lines result from sharing with other European
initiatives, such as EASInet, the networking component of the IBM
European Academic Supercomputing Initiative, EARN, EUnet or NORDUnet.
HEPnet is fully connected via high speed lines to EBONE, the European
IP backbone.
The international topology is mainly a star around CERN, the European
Particle Physics Laboratory located on the French-Swiss border near
Geneva. With lines ranging from 9.6Kbps to 2Mbps it directly connects
France, Hungary, Germany, Greece (on order), India, Israel, Italy,
Netherlands, Poland, Russia, Spain (planned), Switzerland, the UK, and
the USA. The aggregate bandwidth exceeds 12 Mbps, including shared
lines. Nordic countries are also indirectly connected via NORDUnet.
National traffic distribution occurs either through the national
general purpose networks, or through a dedicated HEP network (such as
in France and Italy).
The leased lines either run native IP, or are multiplexed. TCP/IP,
DECnet, RSCS and SNA (plus a residual X.25 service) are provided as
"bearer" services, supporting application services such as distributed
file and tape management and the World Wide Web (WWW) information
access system. Monthly HEP traffic is estimated to be 150 Gbytes.
The network is technically managed by the HEPnet Technical Committee
(HTC) comprising the national HEPnet managers, complemented by a user
driven group, the HEPnet Requirements Committee (HRC).
Hopes for future evolution include a move to speeds in the range of 34
Mbps to meet the requirements of new European particle accelerators
such as the planned Large Hadron Collider (LHC), or the introduction
of multi-media applications for remote collaborative work. In
addition, the community has launched a project for shipping physics
files at 8Mbps over the Olympus satellite of the European Space
Agency.