InfoMagic Standards 1993 July/Disc.iso/inet/isoc/isocnews/issue1_1/040.92b

Text File | 1993-02-08 | 3.4 KB | 68 lines

N-1-1-040.92  EARN, by Frode Greisen*, <[e-mail]>


Established in 1985, EARN has become a stable provider of networking
services for research and academic users in Europe, the Middle East
and Africa.  EARN is an organization with country membership and
technically, the services are totally integrated with the CREN
services.  EARN now comprises 950 host computers in 550 institutions
in 27 countries and the traffic volume increased by 57% from 1989 to
1990 up to a volume of 6 billion records.

Geographically, the main recent development was the connection of new
East European countries.  This happened quickly after a statement was
obtained from the US Department of Commerce that EARN could connect to
COCOM proscribed countries - with some restrictions on speed and
services and as long as appropriate safeguard procedures were
established at the supercomputer sites on the network.  Poland was
first to connect, soon followed by Hungary, CSFR and USSR.
Furthermore, Rumania, Bulgaria and Lithuania have advanced plans
connect.

What EARN offers to the new countries is that by becoming a member of
just one organization, and by using well established and widely
accessible technology, they can exchange electronic mail and files
with 45 other EARN/BITNET countries.  Furthermore, they can use the
value added services on the network and due to the gateways and
bilateral agreements of EARN and CREN with other networking
organizations they can communicate with colleagues in a total of 90
countries.

Networking is in rapid change so is EARN.  Basically, EARN is a store
and forward network using IBM's NJE protocol which is emulated most of
the major operating systems.  Some years ago an EARN OSI project was
established and this project has now been successfully concluded.
With generous support from DEC, IBM and Northern Telecom software
stacks were developed and systems installed enabling countries to run
the NJE protocol on top of the five lower OSI layers, including X.25.
Several countries now employ this system for their international EARN
traffic using the private European X.25 network IXI, which is
temporarily provided by the European COSINE project.

However, other countries chose to rely on the TCP/IP protocol suite
which to run NJE the same way CREN core sites ship traffic via NSFnet.
According to this move, in 1991 EARN has developed a regionalization
plan to group the EARN hosts around core sites which have multiple
links between them.  This means both increased bandwidth and
alternative routes in case of line failure so that users get improved
performance and reduced response times.

The regionalization has only been economically feasible by cooperation
and line sharing with other organizations.  In the mid-eighties, a
9.600 bps EARN line was often the only international connection for
academic networking in a country whereas the community is now slowly
but steadily taking advantage of economy of scale by sharing
international lines running from 64 kbps up to 2 Mbps.

In 1990, EARN adopted a strategic plan.  Working according to this
EARN has increased its geographic coverage and large portions of the
network has moved to higher speeds.  Focus has been put on tools and
documentation to make the use of the network easier for new and
occasional users.  Work is going on to improve application services
such as data base access.  The goal is to continually provide easy to
use low cost networking services to the community.


*Chief Consultant, UNI-C