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Plans to take part in TEN-34
EBI is planning to take part in TEN-34, the Trans-European Network Interconnect at 34 Mbs. TEN-34 is a Telematics for Research/ESPRIT Project co-funded by the European Commission. The project aims to interconnect the separate national research networks of Sweden, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Spain, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, the UK, Luxembourg, Austria, Hungary and Greece with a high-speed 34 Mbs (Megabits/sec) backbone in the next 12 months.
The first parts of the new network, between France and the UK and later this month the interconnection between Germany, Switzerland and Italy, have been finished. Following initial testing, they will be used for production purposes within the next weeks.
The EBI has signed up to do advanced application testing, meaning using the higher bandwidth of the network for several of our in-house services and developments. Four tasks have been identified and submitted as testing beds:
- CORBA linkage of biological databases
The EBI is spearheading a collaborative effort to integrate the biological databases and services of a large number of European research institutes by way of a common framework for the electronic interchange of standardised biological data 'objects'. This common framework is based on the emerging Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) standards. The task will be to evaluate, in co-operation with various research partners, the impact of the TEN-34 enhancement on the feasibility, latency, and throughput of international object-oriented biological data exchange by way of the new CORBA-based infrastructure.
- Remote semantic lenses for visualisation
The EBI is developing a class of advanced 'focus + context' visualisation tools known as 'semantic lenses', designed to aid efficient exploration of the large information spaces represented by the world's huge accumulated biological databases. These lenses are typically built up from a collection of reusable software components known as 'bioWidgets', and access local and remote data sources via a CORBA-bases communication framework. Such interactive, intelligent visualisation tools push all parts of the system - graphics, processors, databases, and network - to the limit of the performance. Typically they demand both low latency and high throughput.
This task will be to evaluate, in cooperation with chosen research partners, the impact on the usability of a small set of representative advanced visualisation tools of the TEN-34 enhancements.
- Interactive exploration of protein structure
Knowledge of the 3D structure of proteins plays an important role in the attempt to understand functionality, though as yet only a small fraction of protein sequences have had their 3D structure determined. Although it is not yet possible to determine the 3D structure of a protein, using a 'similar' known protein sequence (instance from a common evolutionary process), one can imply structure and related similarity in functionality.
Databases exist which group proteins of known structure into families (e.g. the FSSP database). Java based tools are being developed to allow multiple simultaneous views of these data, and interactive explorations of family relationships to help with the discovery of protein function from the new sequences.
- Sequence data dissemination and traditional analytic interfaces
The EBI, in its capacity as a service organisation, distributes Gigabytes of raw sequence and other bio-molecular data to thousands of researchers throughout Europe by two 'traditional' methods: CD-ROM and FTP network transfers. It provides two network interfaces to analytic tools that act on those same data: email and WWW forms. In each category, the more 'primitive' of the methods tends to be used where available network bandwidth to the EBI is too low, and the more 'advanced' method when bandwidth permits. This suggests an opportunity for statistical Quality of Servicemeasurement of the TEN-34 enhancement across the research community supported by the EBI.
Information supplied by: various EBI sources
Resources and further information
European Union
http://europa.eu.int/
Esprit programme
http://www.cordis.lu/esprit./home.html
Information about TEN-34
http://www.dante.net/ten-34.html
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