I took the train back through the rolling hills of the Bernese Oberland and
Fribourg to Geneva. There, I went to see Brian Carpenter, head of networking for
CERN, the European physics laboratory.
CERN is one of the major centers for
the study of high-energy physics in the world. The laboratory has over 5,000
visiting scientists, plus another 3,000 permanent staff members. CERN is funded
by 17 European countries, including a substantial East European membership. The
laboratory is mission oriented, a place to do serious, world-class research. It
has, as have many other physics laboratories such as Fermilab in Chicago, been
on the forefront of networking as a way of allowing physicists to exchange data.
A typical CERN experiment in high-energy physics might involve 400 scientific
staff from 20 to 40 different institutions. For example, one of the experiments
on the
Large Electron-Positron (LEP),
the new 27-km accelerator, involves
physicists from seven CERN members working alongside scientists from China,
India, Israel, Hungary, the U.S., and Russia.
Because of CERN's constituency,
it has become one of the global Internet hubs. Much of the connectivity to
Eastern Europe funnels through CERN. The CERN mail gateway routes messages for
hundreds of networks.
Internally, the CERN network runs the usual motley
assortment of technologies, including gigabit Ultra networks, FDDI, and over
3,500 stations on 60 different Ethernets. Over 400 gigabytes per month are
transferred on the FDDI backbone alone. Over 1,000 stations on a 4 Mbps token
ring are used to control the accelerator.
WAN links at CERN are equally
impressive. Over 150 gigabytes per month are transferred out of the laboratory
over wide area net works. The laboratory has a 384 kbps link to MIT, a T1 line to
Cornell, an E1 line to Bologna, and an 8 Mbps feed to the CHEOPS satellite.
Francois Flückiger, deputy head of networking, estimated that of the total 15
Mbps of international bandwidth devoted to re search networking, 11 Mbps
terminate at CERN.