Distributed applications in a German gigabit WAN

In order to prepare for the upgrade of the German national scientific network to gigabit capacity in the year 2000, two testbeds have been set up. One of them, the 'Gigabit Testbed West', uses a 2.4 Gbit/s ATM link to connect the Research Centre Julich and the GMD-National Research Center for Information Technology in Sankt Augustin. The testbed is the basis for several application projects, ranging from metacomputing to multimedia. This paper gives an overview of the infrastructure of the testbed and its applications. As an example, the real-time analysis and visualization of functional MRI measurements of the human brain are described in detail.