Following in the footsteps of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Athena project, where IBM and DEC collaborated with academics to produce industry-relevant technology, British academics have got together to form the Bloomsbury Computing Consortium. The Bloomsbury connection refers to the Consortium’s location only, although it could stretch to its eccentric foundations. For unlike its US role model which was set up with vouchsafed industry backing, Bloomsbury Computing seems to have relied on a lick and a promise that academics will get more money if they collaborate with each other and industry than if they squabble in their ivory towers. Still, the Consortium stresses that it is a service organisation, not tied to academic research and sees no conflict arising from industry assistance. The Consortium is composed of the British Postgraduate Medical Federation, the Institute of Education, the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, the Royal Veterinary College, University College, and last but by no means least, Birkbeck College which launched the proceedings by opening a new VAX 6310 VMS computer service. Bloomsbury will have a total expenditure of UKP15m to spend on computing over the next seven years. Indeed, the Computer Board for Universities and Research Councils already has UKP4.5m set aside for the project, of which UKP2.5m has been allocated to the first phase of the project. Aside from the VAX at Birkbeck, this first phase includes the installation of several clusters of workstations within the participating schools. The aim is to have clusters of up to 50 workstations in these academic institutions, supplemented by central mainframe facilities for time sharing, large-scale file storage and so on. The Bloomsbury Consortium will then be linked to all the main academic networks such as JANET, and the US University network InterNet, along with public package switches. As a pilot activity, an FDI Fibre Digital Data Inter face network running at 100Mbits per second is al ready in operation at University College. The idea behind the Consortium is that it will pursue and demonstrate projects in distributed networking that are aligned with industry needs in return for indus trial patronage. Projects already in the pipeline include the development and implementation of inter face technology using the X Window System, and an authentification service modelled on Massachusetts’ Athena project’s product, Kerberos; and Kerberos, as the classicists amongst you will know, was the dog guarding Hades. Bloomsbury is looking for help from the bigger computer companies, of which DEC is repor ted to have its foot in the door with its VAX/VMS system, while Sun Microsystems is also claimed to be looking at offering support for projects. – Katy Ring
