1. TESTBED (Technical)

2. DataTAG team in front of the testbed
Despite the existence of a 10Gigabit Ethernet standard (WAN-PHY) for transporting Ethernet frames over SONET/SDH framed circuits, there is a lack of commercial layer 1 products, likewise there was also a lack of proven commercial layer 2 products at the time the technical decision had to be made. Since then, the Force10 WAN-PHY solution has been demonstrated across the Global Crossing DWDM infrastructure between Geneva and Amsterdam. In order to meet DataTAG’s requirement to allow native 10GigE connections to the testbed, a layer 2 emulation solution based on Juniper T320 routers has therefore been deployed initially.
To the best of our knowledge, DataTAG has been the first transoceanic testbed with native 10GigE access capabilities.
Shortly after the delivery of the new transatlantic 10Gb/s optical circuit, a new Internet2 landspeed record was established by Caltech & CERN between CERN in Geneva and the Starlight in Chicago with a single TCP/IPv4 stream of 5.44Gb/s during 26 minutes, which is equivalent to transferring 1.1Terabytes of data, or a full 680MB CD per second or a full length DVD movie in approximately 8 seconds!
   
The DataTAG project is led by CERN and brings together the following European leading research agencies: Italy’s Instituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN), France’s Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique (INRIA), the UK’s Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council (PPARC), and Holland’s University of Amsterdam (UvA). The DataTAG project is very closely associated with the European Union DataGrid project, the largest grid project in Europe also led by CERN.
The DataTAG testbed is jointly funded by the European Union, the US National Science Foundation through the Electronic Visualisation Lab (EVL) at University of Illinois in Chicago (UIC) and the US Department of Energy (DoE) through the California Institute of Technology (CALTECH).