Joint Research Project

BATM ADVANCED COMMUNICATIONS LIMITED 12 October 1999 BATM Advanced Communications in joint research project with CERN CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, is building a major new particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider, LHC, which is due to come into operation in 2005. Experiments at the LHC will produce enormous amounts of data which must be collected and processed in real time. This necessitates the use of very large high performance computer networks capable of moving up to 100 Gbytes/s of data between several thousand data sources and processing elements. Investigations into how such levels of performance might be achieved have been the subject of R&D activities at CERN for several years. Joint research into scalable Ethernet switches and routers is being carried out by CERN and BATM, a leading LAN equipment manufacturer. This work is supported by the SWIFT project, part of the European Union's Information Society Technologies (IST) Programme, and builds on the work of CERN in previous EU projects. The aim is to develop a new generation of large scalable Ethernet switches and routers which will be important components in the evolution of the Internet. A prototype Gigabit Ethernet switch has been developed jointly by CERN and BATM and tested with several applications. It forms the basis of BATM's new Titan T6 range of products which will be introduced during Telecom 99 in Geneva this week. The switch can support up to 128 Gigabit Ethernet ports or 1024 Fast Ethernet ports and has sophisticated quality of service (QoS) features for delivering voice, video and data together. Professor Bob Dobinson, who has led the R&D on the CERN side for a number of years, said: 'I believe it is strongly in CERN's interest to work closely with industry to prepare for our new LHC experiments. The European Union's IST program offers an excellent way of doing this. It's a win-win situation'. Ofer Harpak, Chief Technology Officer of BATM, commented: 'We are very excited about the ground-breaking research we have been conducting with CERN. It has enabled us to develop the new Titan T6 switch in a live environment. This collaboration shows the benefits of academia and industry working together to develop vastly superior technologies for the next century.' For further information please contact: Shore Capital Graham Shore 0171 734 7293 Ludgate Communications 0171 253 2252 Edward Macquisten http://www.batm.com/