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 2Gbps 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.