EVO powers communication for global collaborations

For the Large Hadron Collider collaborators who are spread across the globe, staying connected presents challenges. The Enabling Virtual Organizations (EVO) system, a worldwide network designed for institutions participating in the LHC experiments and other high-energy physics collaborative programs, makes international collaboration easier by providing a reliable and secure system for real-time virtual meetings.

EVO, winner of the 2009 Internet2 IDEA award for applied advanced networking “at its best,” hails from the California Institute of Technology. In 2008 it hosted more than 9,100 virtual LHC collaboration meetings with a total of over 4,200 users. The combined time each user spent in EVO LHC meetings last year totals more than 86,300 hours. Unlike commercial networks, EVO poses no restriction on the number of participants in a meeting. On September 10, 2008, about 1,250 sites around the world participated via EVO in the LHC startup event, with up to 250 sites connected at any given time.

The EVO “grid” consists of 52 servers deployed at key network locations in 22 countries. Network locations include institutions linked by education and research networks such as JANET in the UK and RENATER in France, and large laboratories such as CERN in Switzerland and Brookhaven National Laboratory in the U.S. EVO uses the grid monitoring service MonALISA (Monitoring Agents using a Large Integrated Services Architecture), also developed at Caltech, to connect users to the best available server and to provide load balancing for the entire system.

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