The Distributed ASCI Supercomputer (DAS) is an experimental testbed for research on wide-area distributed and parallel applications. The system was built for the Advanced School for Computing and Imaging (ASCI), a Dutch research school in which several universities participate. The goal of DAS is to provide a common computational infrastructure for researchers within ASCI, who work on various aspects of parallel and distributed systems, including communication substrates, programming environments, and applications.

The DAS-3, as a successor of DAS-1 and DAS-2 is a new Grid infrastructure for experimental Computer Science research in the Netherlands. The system will have five clusters with about 270 dual-cpu nodes supercomputers in total, which are integrated into a single large-scale distributed system using the multi-color optical networking capabilities from SURFnet. Four clusters will be located at the following universities: Vrije Universiteit (VU), University of Amsterdam (UvA), Delft University of Technology (TUD) and Leiden University (LU). The MultimediaN (MN) project will also have its own cluster in Amsterdam, for investigating many fundamental and computer-intensive problems in multimedia.

As one of its distinguishing features, DAS-3 employs a very novel internal wide-area interconnect based on lightpaths. The dynamic performance aspects of lightpaths management in DAS-3 will be investigated within the StarPlane project.