The Role of ESLEA in the development of eVLBI

TL;DR

The paper discusses how the ESLEA project contributed to advancing eVLBI technology by enabling high-bandwidth internet connections for radio astronomy data transfer, transforming traditional data storage and processing methods.

Contribution

It highlights the role of the ESLEA project in developing high-bandwidth network connections crucial for eVLBI, a significant step in radio astronomy data transfer.

Findings

ESLEA facilitated high-speed data transfer (~1Gbps) for eVLBI.

eVLBI now competes with traditional data storage methods.

Network advancements have enabled real-time data sharing in radio astronomy.

Abstract

The internet has been used for data transfer in radio astronomy ever since its inception; however it is only recently that network bandwidth capability means that the internet becomes competitive with traditional forms of data storage. Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) uses widely separated telescopes between which high bandwidth direct connections have not been feasible until recently. The academic networks now allow us to connect at high data rates (~1Gbps) in "eVLBI". The ESLEA project (Exploitation of Switched Lightpaths for E-science Applications) has played a major role in the development of eVLBI. We outline this development in this paper.