Teleconferencing for the remote participation in the European Fusion Programme

Piroska Giese

KFKI RMKI

giese@rmki.kfki.hu

The success of the experimental physics collaborations, with their international spread around the world, depends on the frequent information exchange across several countries. The experiments are carried out in a few centres, where hundreds of researchers from several countries are also remotely involved. The collaboration between scientists requires extensive use of teleconferencing in the widest sense.

In December 2001 an ad-hoc working group by the EFDA (European Fusion Development Agreement) Leader was defined to provide guidance on standards for the implementation of teleconferencing hardware and software in order to establish an economic, reliable and compatible system. The immediate motivation is that two standards for teleconferencing, the VRVS and H.323 are already in use in the remote participation activity within the European fusion program.

A short overview of the two teleconferencing tools, the H.323/VRVS integration tests of the EFDA ad-hoc workgroup on teleconferencing, the compatibility issues relating to software and hardware systems and a cost implication for the implementation of systems will be presented. The participants of the integration tests were from different European fusion laboratories, as DRFC-Cadarache, EFDA-CSU (Close Support Unit), IPP-Garching, JET-Culham, RFX-Padova, TEC-Jülich and from KFKI RMKI-(KFKI Reaesarch Institute for Particle and Nuclear Physics) Budapest as well.