[Internet2] Internet2 forms part of a large scientific instrument.

[Humberto Ortiz Zuazaga]

The Internet2 allowed scientists to construct a transatlantic scientific
instrument. The Arecibo Observatory and 3 other sites in Europe
participated in an experiment where the 4 radiotelescopes were joined
into an "electronic Very Long Baseline Interferometer" (eVLBI). The link
is achieved by transmitting the data from the telescopes live over
high-speed research networks to a central processing station in Europe.

>From the eVLBI news:

"eVLBI research achieved another first on Friday 10th September when
real-time fringes were detected between the 305m Arecibo radio telescope
and three antennas located in Europe."

Pictures and more information at the eVLBI site:

http://www.evlbi.org/evlbi/te024/te024.html

During the experiment, 32 Mbps (millions of bits per second,
approximately 21 T1 lines or 600 times faster than dial up modems) of
data were transmitted from each of the telescopes to a processing center
in the Netherlands, where the results were analyzed live. Press releases
of an earlier experiment are also available:

http://www.jive.nl/docs/pr/pr_realtime.html

--
Humberto Ortiz Zuazaga
Programmer-Archaeologist
High Performance Computing facility
University of Puerto Rico
http://www.hpcf.upr.edu/~humberto/