Just over 3 years ago we moved to the north of the Netherlands. To
most fellow countryman we might just as well have moved to the moon.
It's a two hour drive to get from here to Amsterdam it takes twice as
long to get from there to here (according to “western-ers”). The
quality of living here is a secret we rather keep to ourselves, the
amount of amazing ICT technology we have deserves some more attention.
Yesterday (may 12th) I visited the first meeting of the ICT platform Groningen. A quite diverse day. The keynote was on the Lofar
project. The Netherlands already have (one of) the finest composite
radio telescopes (astronomy) in the world, the lofar project is about
creating a new one with a radius of over 400 kilometers, centered
around Dwingelo. This project involves
- Installing 10.000's of sensor devices
- Connecting all these sensors in a heterogenous network
- Centralized online processing of all incoming data in Groningen
The amount of data, the bandwith to transport it and power required
to process it is gigantic. The spin-off of all these projects
as well. We allready have a very high quality internet connection
thanks to the transatlantic cable landing here (another one is the Amsterdam internet exchange), lofar's
infrastructure will spread broadband over the country. Further R&D
promises devlopment in astronomy, agriculture, geophysics,
super-computing and so on. One of the best things of the project is
that it manages to cross boundaries in the world of science.
The meeting had sessions on all the nice things you can do with
broadband internet. Good, but nothing new to a dnj-reader. The top
attraction of the day was a robot challenge where contesting devices
were hunting plastic balls. Allways great fun. Two out of nine
competitors used .NET for the controlling software. One of them won the
prize for best overall design, the other one didn't run due to
mechanical faillure.
Yes, it runs .NET
Peter