Summary: EHUG Meeting October 28 1996 in Stuttgart

Organization: Peter Haas RUS Stuttgart, Arie van Praag CERN Geneva.

Represented the HNF Board: Francois Gaullier H.P. Grenoble, Arie van Praag

Agenda:

DR Alfred Geiger opened the EHUG meeting with a description of the Federal HPC Center in Stuttgart.

Francois Gaullier presented in name of HNF: "HIPPI in the Market Place"

Peter Haas with "Gigabit Networking at RUS and HWW" gave a detailed description of the coupled computer centers of RUS and HWW which are located at opposite ends of the Stuttgart city area, roughly 20 km apart. A good overview was given why a certain technology was chosen in each part of the network. He also described some of the security measures taken in different parts of the network.

Carl Pick from Genroco was hindered at the last moment and the presentation was given by Peter Haas with the Genroco transparencies. A number of new Interfaces were described based on the proven Genroco TURBOstor architecture, as well as the coming Serial HIPPI Interface, both at 800- and 1600-Mbit/s speeds.

Arie Van Praag Guided the discussion around the Status of EHUG.

EHUG so far has been guided by Peter Haas and Arie van Praag on a basis of Chairman and Secretariat, both found it necessary to clarify a number of points concerning the future direction of EHUG.

As outcome of the discussions it was decided that:

1) EHUG will stay as an Ad-Hoc organization with no officially registered form, Membership will be free, but commercial firms will be asked to sponsor an organizational budget.

2) EHUG will try to organize at least one meeting every year. The organizer will change from year to year. Because of the large number of third party activities in Automne the date will gradully be changed to February.

3) The EHUG pages on the Web will stay in Europe ( CERN ) but a tighter connection to the HNF pages is wished. EHUG will post HIPPI related papers on the Web, and will also act as an exchange forum for user development work in the high speed networking area.

4) An extension of the EHUG Board is wished, It was proposed that the organizer of a meeting will automatically be part of the EHUG Board.

Candidate for the next meeting is Drs. W. J. M. Melis of NLR in the Netherlands.

After lunch Helmut Muhl-Kuhner, represent of Netstar gave an overview of the new products from Ascend and Netstar.

Arie van Praag presented the extensions of the HIPPI network in the CERN computer center, including the 10 Km Serial-HIPPI link to a physics experiment, and described the tests done with HIPPI switches directed to physics event building as part of a large data acquisition system..

The day was finished with a visit of the RUS computer center and its vast communication facilities, followed by an impressive live size 3D demonstration of simulations done at RUS and HWW.

For 1997 the EHUG meeting is foreseen in June near Amsterdam, Netherlands

For 1998 the EHUG meeting is foreseen in February in Lugano, Switzerland

This is one of the CERN High Speed Interconnect pages - 9 December 1996 - Arie van Praag