History
Photo Archive
Click here to visit the JIVE Photo Archive.
JIVE Establishment
The Joint Institute for VLBI in Europe was formally established in 1993 by the European Consortium for VLBI.
Construction of the Correlator
The construction of the EVN MkIV VLBI data processor was an international, collaborative project, involving the EVN Consortium and various other partners (NASA GSFC, USNO, Smithsonian CfA, and IfAG supported work at the MIT Haystack Observatory). Together these institutes formed the International Advanced Correlator Consortium (IACC).
- Fall 1992: Design started
- June 9, 1993: Official inauguration of JIVE
- March 1995: First hardware arrived
- November 1996: Correlator Room ready
- 21 July 1997: First fringes
- 22 October 1998: Official opening of the correlator
From tape to disk to fiber
Regular operations started after a commissioning period of a year, but it was actually the start of an ongoing evolution. Since then, almost every component has been upgraded or replaced several times, and so have the operational tools and practices. Most importantly, the tape units were gradually replaced by disk systems, and fiber connections started to replace the shipping of disks: e-VLBI.
- 7 April 1999: First Image, later improved
- 6 August 1999: Second image
- January 2000: First science
- June 2003: First image with Mark5 disk systems
- January 2004: First e-VLBI EVN image
- April 28, 2004: First real-time e-VLBI image; 3 EVN telescopes at 32 Mb/s
- December 2004: EVN completely disk-based; tapes still used for globals
- February 2, 2007: e-VLBI image with 5 EVN telescopes at 512 Mb/s
- Jan 16, 2009: marathon global e-VLBI observation (17 telescopes, 33 hours)
What next?
The development will go on: more powerful data units and correlators will replace the current ones, and a new generation of software comes with it:
- 2009-2010: Mark5B units replace Mark5A + station unit combinations
- 2010-2011: Mark5C units go up to 4Gb/s and better match modern correlators
- 2010-2011: JIVE's software correlator takes more and more operational load
- 2011-2012: a UniBoard correlator replaces the current hardware correlator