Three-Year European SCAMPI Project Completed Successfully

The last day of March was the official closing date for the three-year European SCAMPI project, whose participants included experts from the Czech Republic. The main objective of the SCAMPI (Scalable Monitoring Platform for the Internet) project was designing and implementing a traffic monitoring architecture for high-speed networks with throughputs up to 10 Gbps.

All of the targets of the project, participated by important organizations from all across Europe, were achieved according to the original schedule. Satisfaction with the results was also expressed at the project participants' final conference held on 25 January 2005 in Brno. Project researchers from the Czech Republic, specifically from CESNET and Masaryk University in Brno, worked mainly on the development of firmware for the monitoring adapter, its driver, library of functions and MAPI implementation.

The SCAMPI project, which has developed a hardware-accelerated platform for passive monitoring of high-speed networks, is followed by the LOBSTER (Large Scale Monitoring for Broadband Internet Infrastructure) project. Its goal is to install a network of monitoring nodes based on the SCAMPI platform throughout Europe. The LOBSTER project started last September and should be completed in the next year. Its consortium consists of organizations from five European countries and New Zealand. It represents national research networks (the Czech Republic is represented by the CESNET2 network), university research centres and commercial partners.

The CESNET association was founded by universities and the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic. It is currently financed primarily by its members and the Research and Development Council. The association operates and develops CESNET2, the national gigabit optical network intended for research and education, and participates in the research and development of information and communication technologies. Thanks to its research activities and achieved results, the CESNET association represents the Czech Republic in the European GN2 project, as well as in other international projects. Among other countries, the association currently cooperates with Canada, the Netherlands, and the USA on the construction of GLIF (Global Lambda Integrated Facility), a global lambda network whose Czech section is called CzechLight.