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.