GÉANT2 A global Leader

GÉANT2 and Beyond

The Monday afternoon session was devoted to reviewing the achievements of GÉANT2 and to looking beyond to assure the future of European research networking.

Mario Campolargo (Acting Director of Emerging Technologies and Infrastructures, Information Society and Media Directorate General at the EC) presented the EC’s e-Infrastructures future vision of providing almost unlimited bandwidth and helping to create virtual scientific communities. Through its e-Infrastructures initiative, the EC continues to be focused on “aligning policies and vision”, connecting the finest minds (through GÉANT), enabling them to share the best facilities and resources (through EGEE, other grid projects and PRACE) and consequently to building global virtual scientific communities. His speech clearly demonstrated the strength of the EU’s commitment to research and education networking.

 Hans Döbbeling (General Manager at DANTE) described the central achievements of the GÉANT2 project incompassing hybrid networking, enhanced bandwidth and the extensive R&D programme that is resulting in a number of network services including performance monitoring, flexible service provisioning and roaming access with a number of these already in transition to service phase.

Ivan Maric (Deputy Director at SRCE, University of Zagreb) addressed the lessons that had been learned in GÉANT2. In particular he noted that there is still a digital divide still in some countries despite the excellent collaboration between the NREN building blocks behind GÉANT2. He emphasised the importance of effective planning, and the building of human capacity alongside infrastructure and service developments, as GÉANT grows and evolves. He reflected on how it is a long and tedious path from a pilot service to an operational service and that such planning is essential to help qualify and select innovative technology and to ease this process.

Dorte Olesen (Director General UNI-C and President of TERENA) presented the EARNEST study findings, reporting on how access to digital libraries has broadened the research fields of many participants and is paving the way for new interdisciplinary collaboration. Researchers expect the future to bring new possibilities of faster communication methods. The importance of end users was recognised with a need to establish formal procedures to identify their requirements. The study also concluded that there is a need for GÉANT to continue supporting the development of end-to-end services such as PERT, and security policies that facilitate end-to-end connectivity, and for better-integrated AA infrastructures.

Internet of the Future

 Vasilis Maglaris (Chairman of the NREN Committee) took to the stage with a glimpse at what the future holds, declaring that “the time is ripe” for Europe to profit from its long-term investment in research and education networking and that the “growing global role and commitments of the GÉANT community are testimony to the success of European research networking”. He spoke about the influence of the GÉANT2 successor in helping to shape the internet of the future and how the next-generation network will provide a factory of networking resources and services, extending the service portfolio to provide multi-domain services to NRENs such as PERT, security, confederated roaming, performance monitoring and also integrated IT services - multi-domain hybrid networking services at speeds of 10-100Gbps.

His “network vision” is of a “global virtual village enabler” shaping the future communication behaviour of scientists and researchers. It will become an innovative multi-domain hybrid networking environment, delivering flexible and scalable production-quality services for users and contributing to technology standards and policies to help create the internet of the future.