published on Tuesday, June 9, 2009

SARA supports successful 100 Gbit/s test of SURFnet

SARA has supported the successful 100 Gbit/s test SURFnet has performed on the existing international SURFnet optical connection between Amsterdam and Hamburg. This test covers a distance of 1244 km without the use of amplifiers. The test consisted of two 40 Gbit/s and 100 Gbit/s lambda connections through a fiber pair provided by the Internet Educational Equal Access Foundation (IEEAF).

This test was done in cooperation with various partners, among which Nortel, Telindus and SARA. New optical technology of Nortel, located at the SURFnet Point-of-Presence at SARA in Amsterdam, has been used. For this demonstration, SARA's network research department has developed scripts to display specific (dispersion) parameters on a special website, using the TL1 toolkit which has been designed by SARA.

Supercomputers like Huygens at SARA and large-scale scientific projects such as Lofar and the Large Hadron Collider at CERN generate very large point-to-point data from and to (among others) SARA in Amsterdam. The availability of ultra-fast network connections is essential for the processing of such data. The presence of the large SURFnet Point-of-Presence at SARA gives access to equipment, computational power and storage facilities at SARA and is further improved through this new generation of optical networks.

See also press release of SURFnet.