Infrastructure

The Baden-Württemberg State Research Network BelWü

The significance of networking for Baden-Württemberg as a location for science was identified already very early on and realised in the long term with the establishment (in 1986) and continuous development of the state university network BelWü (Baden-Württemberg’s extended LAN). BelWü currently connects, by means of a redundant core network, all state universities with 10 Gbit/s. All other state universities (universities of education, art and music academies, cooperative state universities, public libraries as well as other research institutions) are also connected with high speed data lines. Smaller institutions, for example schools, libraries and other public institutions, can connect to this network via DSL, dial-in or landline connection. The BelWü currently integrates more than 2,100 institutions with ca. 350,000 computers.

The majority of the network infrastructure in the wide area range (currently 38 links) is comprised of fibre optic cables operating with 10 Gbit/s. There are plans to increase the speed of the core network to 100 Gbit/s. Bandwidth is being leased from telecommunication companies (10 or 1 Gbit/s, ca. 13 links) only for the links for which there are currently no optical fibres. In addition, there are also numerous fibre optic links (ca. 50) within the cities.

Topologically, the wide area links form sub-rings which, together with the house feeds with redundant sections at the universities, achieve, particularly here, an extremely high degree of system stability.

The active network infrastructure of the state university network (router, etc.) is operated by a work group (BelWü Coordination) at the University of Stuttgart which also offers value-added services (mail, web server, name server, etc.) for smaller participants.

Besides providing high bit rate communication between participants of the state university network and the international network connection, the BelWü is also increasingly forming the indispensable basis for new, distributed supply concepts for science in the state. In this way, library services are already being offered to many universities and colleges as part of a central operational concept. State-wide back-up services are also being offered on the BelWü infrastructure. By means of a grid infrastructure (bwGRiD), users can also access distributed, application-specific computer clusters. Furthermore, BelWü also allows efficient access to high-performance computers, for example, and high-capacity storage resources (bwLSDF, Large Scale Data Facility) for applications which are especially storage intensive, e.g. in life sciences or for archiving purposes.