Digital Equipment Corp is stress testing a large scale Asynchronous Transfer Mode network at Carnegie Mellon University in the hope of finding compelling applications for the high bandwidth technology. Carnegie Mellon and DEC are sharing the costs of the $7.5m, 750-user network test setup at the University’s School of Computer Science. The system will consist of Digital’s Asynchronous Mode networking technology and 500 Alpha workstations. Users will test the network through a series of University projects, and DEC hopes that one of these will prove to be the killer application for the technology. Carnegie researchers will use the new infrastructure to create a showcase of the kinds of new capabilities that would be available in a high bandwidth environment, the University said. When customers buy a new technology they want to know how well it will scale. This test will speak strongly, said Gill Brezler, technical manager for commercial servers at Digital. Among the projects underway are Virtualised Reality, which involves the transmission of three-dimensional video images that combine computer graphics and scenes from the real world and the transmission of video information from Informedia, an interactive on-line digital video library system.
