Dynamic provisioning of LightPath services for radio astronomy applications

A demonstration at iGRID 2005 used dynamic, deterministic, and dedicated LightPath network services to link radio telescopes from around the world with computational facilities at the MIT Haystack Observatory to create a single coherent instrument for real-time astronomical and geodetic research. The “electronic Very Long Baseline Interferometry” (e-VLBI) application provides ultra-high resolution images of very faint and very distant objects in the universe. The application-specific network topology carried 2 Gbps of VLBI data from radio telescopes in Europe, North America, and Japan to Haystack for real-time correlation processing. This paper describes the application, the network technologies employed for the demonstration, the results, challenges and future work.