The demonstration was first showcased at the 10th annual Global LambdaGrid Workshop held at the Global Lambda Integrated Facility (GLIF) at CERN, Geneva, Switzerland.

The four organizations joined forces to create a 40 Gbps long-distance optical network to explore a future where the network will continue to enable collaboration in local, regional, national, and international research through high-performance data distribution, next-generation video, and data processing. Combining their expertise in advanced photonics, innovative hardware, and high-performance computing to complete the demonstration, the organizations created a network using an existing 1,650 km high-quality SURFnet link, connecting an experimental array of high-performance equipment equipped with a Mellanox ConnectX®-2 EN 40GbE NIC from the University of Amsterdam to a remote data processing unit with its corresponding interface at the GLIF meeting site. The demonstration boosted 26 Gbps (the practical limit of the PCIe bus) from the Amsterdam processor to the processor at CERN using a single wavelength, or lambda. The network infrastructure was based on Ciena's Optical Multiservice Edge (OME) 6500, equipped with 40GbE interfaces. This speed was achieved through a simple upgrade from the previous 10GbE, without the need for signal regeneration or any modifications to the existing infrastructure.

The demonstration included a variety of Internet transport protocols optimized for this advanced network, as well as a parallel model verifier (DiVinE) that had been optimized for distributed processing by Professor Henri Bal's group at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.