On this week's edition of A Series of Tubes AARNet's Optical Operations division infrastructure specialist Ivan Phillips joins the show to discuss the networking technology in eVLBI (electronic Very Long Baseline Interferometer) telescope experiments.
For the uninitiated, AARNet stands for Australia's Academic and Research Network.
In eVLBI, telescopes separated by long distances (in this case, Parkes, Narrabri, Canberra, China and Japan) are linked together to create a telescope with an effective diameter close to that of the Earth. Such projects need big pipes, with each telescope generating more than half a gigabit of traffic per second.
The resulting project doesn't just help the scientific community; it's also part of getting Australia involved in major international educational and grid computing projects.
As you'll hear, A Series of Tubes has a new host, Richard Chirgwin. He's got loads of experience as an analyst and a journalist and really knows his tubes! You can contact Richard with story tips and feedback by e-mail: rchirgwin at ozemail dot com dot au.
