Netapdex showcased high-speed networking at EITC

At the large European IT conference and exhibition in Brussels last week, Netapdex showcased the one year results of a number of high-speed European networking projects. APAT, EROPPA, CANET, COVAS, RCnet, all funded by the European Commission's Esprit programme, experimented with networks ranging from ISDN to high-end ATM. Applications included co-operative work and distributed processing. It was the first time that there was a direct ATM connection to the yearly EITC conference. Netapdex experience shows ATM, Java, and VRML are still not mature technologies.

Within Netapdex, there are nine Esprit projects which are focused on high-speed networking brought together. All the projects started a year ago. Some have finished, but most of them continue for a year or so. The results so far with high-speed networking were summarized at a Netapdex meeting in Brussels.

The networking technologies used were ATM, ISDN and leased lines, with on the higher level, IP. ATM seems to be ready for basic services. However, it is stil not mature. Bandwidth on demand and connection on demand is still missing. ATM over Europe wide distances, still needs the intervention of a lot of technical people which communicate over the good old telephone. Where available, and that is not everywhere in Europe, ISDN provided a cost-effective solution when the bandwidth offered met the project requirements.

Firewalls, designed to keep undesirable people out, proved a great obstacle when trying to connect for instance departments of two companies that needed to work together. Convincing firewall administrators to allow traffic for a certain application that could be benificial for a company, is close to a mission impossible.

Nevertheless, several projects showed live results in Brussels:

EROPPA - supporting rendering jobs
The EROPPA project showed their final results in Brussels: Commercials and educational programmes that would have taken 80 days to render on large graphic supercomputers, can now be executed remotely at supercomputer centres. The software, called EROPPA manager, is now available to other computer centres and media- or post production companies.

APAT - supporting professional applications on ATM The APAT project showed mid-term results in Brussels. The project is creating a co-operative professional working environment based on ATM technology. Pirelli wants to use the APAT environment for concurrent engineering of tyres and cables. In the APAT view, ATM, VRML and Java technologies still have not matured completely.

CAnet - Collaborative automotive network
CAnet showcased computer supported collaborative working tools in Brussels. Engineers from a supplier, Siemens Automotive, work together with engineers from car manufacturer Renault on designing automotive parts. The already partially working environment will speed-up the car design processor considerably.

COVAS - Collaborative visualisation of automotive simulations
Porsche, Falkenburger and ARUP use RUS, Stuttgart developed COVISE environment to visualise large amounts of FEM or CAD data over the network. Engineers can discuss the results of the modelling with remote colleagues.

More information on the Netapdex web site.