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n-1-3-020.33a
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n-1-3-020.33
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 5000 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.