InformationWeek

Pump Up The Bandwidth

By Jan E. Johnson
Issue date: Oct. 23, 1995

Dave Beering may have the coolest networking job in the country. His official title at Amoco Corp. in Chicago is senior staff telecommunications analyst. In reality, he's Amoco's ATM (asynchronous transfer mode) expert, involved in a dazzling ATM project involving multiple telecom carriers and equipment vendors.

The Amoco project is called Aries (ATM Research and Industrial Enterprise Study). Now under the sponsorship of the American Petroleum Institute, the project has been expanded to include multiple oil companies, NASA, the Department of Energy, Ameritech, AT&T, Pacific Bell, Sprint, Teleport Communications Group, and WorldCom. Switch vendors Cisco, Fore Systems, and Newbridge are also involved.

The goal is to demonstrate the most comprehensive, end-to-end ATM network ever built--operating independent of speed, media, and distance, Beering says.

The ATM network that Beering and his team demonstrated on Oct. 11 covered an estimated 3.5 million square miles and ran at speeds ranging from 45 Mbps to 155 Mbps. Traffic traversed a high-speed NASA communications satellite and five independent carrier networks. The ATM wide area network linked a simulated seismic equation running on a supercomputer in Texas. The results were shown on seven workstations running over the ATM network. At the workstations, researchers reviewed a visual presentation of processed seismic data.

With current systems, it takes about a year for seismic data collected at remote sites to make it to the desktops of Amoco scientists. Beering notes that as oil companies move to exploit new oil reserve s in remote regions such as Siberia, the demand for fast computational results will drive the need for high-speed ATM networks.

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