What is White Rabbit Collaboration?

What is White Rabbit (WR)?

• It is a technology developed at CERN, in collaboration with institutes and companies, to synchronize devices in the accelerators down to sub-nanoseconds and solve the challenge of establishing a common notion of time across a network.
• White Rabbit Switches provides sub-nanosecond synchronization accuracy, which formerly required dedicated hard-wired timing systems, with the flexibility and modularity of real-time Ethernet networks.
• It achieves sub-nanosecond accuracy in Ethernet based networks.
• A White Rabbit network may be used solely to provide timing and synchronization to a distributed electronic system, or to provide both timing and real-time data transfer.
• First used in 2012, the application of this fully open-source technology has quickly expanded outside the field of particle physics.
• In 2020, it was included in the worldwide industry standard known as Precision Time Protocol (PTP),governed by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).
• A key distinctive feature of White Rabbit, is that it is open source and based on standards.
• Companies and institutes can therefore adapt it to their needs and incorporate it in their products and systems.
• White Rabbit is used in the finance sector as well as in many research infrastructures, and it is currently being evaluated for application in the future quantum internet.
• The technology could also play a key role in the future landscape of global time dissemination technologies, which currently rely heavily on satellites.

White Rabbit Collaboration

• It is a membership-based global community whose objective is to maintain a high-performance open-source technology that meets the needs of users and to facilitate its uptake by industry. 
• The WR Collaboration will provide dedicated support and training, facilitate R&D projects between entities with common interests and complementary expertise, and establish a testing ecosystem that fosters trust in products that incorporate the open-source technology.

Q1: What is the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)?

The IIEEE is a professional association with its corporate office in New York City and its operations center in Piscataway, New Jersey. It was formed in 1963 from the amalgamation of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers and the Institute of Radio Engineers. Today, it is the world’s largest association of technical professionals with more than 420,000 members in over 160 countries around the world. Its objectives are the educational and technical advancement of electrical and electronic engineering, telecommunications, computer engineering and allied disciplines.

Source: CERN launches the White Rabbit Collaboration