General Motors’ Electronic Data Systems Corp is terribly proud of its new network control centre in Plano, Texas, opened last week, which has been designed to manage the communications of EDS’ 21 Information Processing Centers worldwide. EDS claims the EDS NET, managed by the new Information Management Center, is the world’s largest private digital network. The network processes over 730m transactions each month, providing voice, video and data communications for more than 6,000 customers. The Information Management Center provides support for engineering and communications, with space for 550 staff members: it will also monitor 500,000 phone calls each day, and be used to test hardware and software systems developed by the company. And the Management Center has quite a lot of processing power under its command: Electronic Data Systems claims that it will watch over computers with total processing power of 3.4 GIPS – that’s 3,400m instructions per second.
