GÉANT2 A global Leader

Global Leadership Global/Regional Networking Perspective

GÉANT2 is renowned for its global leadership in research networking, through links from the pan-European network to other EU-funded initiatives: TEIN (Asia-Pacific), ALICE (Latin America), EUMEDCONNECT (Mediterranean), ORIENT (China link), SEREEN (South Eastern Europe) and soon the BSI (Black Sea Interconnection).

The Tuesday morning session of the conference was dedicated to these regional networks and links that together enable true global collaboration. Each gave an overview of their network and activities in their region. A series of lightening presentations and a panel discussion about future networking requirements with the global participants ended this session. Many speakers joined the event via videoconference over the Isabel project.

 The session was opened by Marko Bonac (Director of RNES) presenting an informative view of ARNES’s good work in Slovenia.

• TEIN2 was represented by Denis Villorente (Director of ASTI in the Philippines) by VC from the Philippines and David West (TEIN2 Project Manger at DANTE) in a video interview.
• The SEREEN project was represented by Yannis Mitsos (GRNET)
• EUMEDCONNECT network was presented by Yousef Torman (Executive Director of JUNet)
• Florencio Utreras (Executive Director of CLARA) represented the ALICE project
• Boris Japarov, Director General of KazRENA discussed the new Black Sea Interconnection that will connect the South Caucasus countries.

Current and future uses of pan-European networking

The third session of the conference was given to the users of the network, for GÉANT customers to put forward their experiences and what the network and services has meant to their particular project or activity.

Hervé Pero (Directorate-General for Research at the EC) opened the session by describing how research infrastructures are facilities, resources and related services used by the scientific community for conducting cutting-edge research, knowledge transmission and exchange. He used GÉANT2 as a key example of how eInfrastructures are enabling global collaboration and considered whether the GÉANT project had any role in helping to attract young people to careers across the academic disciplines.

The user perspective

 David Foster (Head of Communications and Networking at CERN) described the eagerly-awaited LHC project, scheduled to begin later this year and the enormity of the data sizes that will be generated when the LHC starts: 600 million proton collisions expected per second; 15 petabytes of data in first year, with the LHC expected to generate enough data to easily fill any network capacity likely to become available in the next 10 or 20 years. Numerous data centres are required and for the first time in high-energy particle physics, the network is an integral part of the computing system.

He highlighted the integral role of high performance networks in particle physics research and emphasised the importance for Europe to lead and innovate in this area. He stressed that it was vital to embrace the possibilities of social networking which would enable openness and inclusiveness of the younger generation, assuring the future of research and the success of the GÉANT network.

Luigi Fusco (Senior Advisor for Earth Observation Applications at the European Space Agency) described further challenges for the future of GÉANT2, specifying that the network must evolve to meet the user needs and allow real-time data access to meet the political and strategic requirements of the project.

Huib Jan van Langevelde (Director of JIVE), spoke about the successes of the radio astronomy project and how the GÉANT2 high bandwidth connectivity had allowed researchers to see greater detail in star structure and formation. He went on to explain, that with the next generation of GÉANT2 and extended connectivity to additional telescopes, the project hopes to progress its research into spacecraft tracking and monitoring (astrometry).

Ralph Niederberger (DEISA Network Team Leader) described the objectives of the supercomputing project and how the dedicated 10 Gbps bandwidth provided by GÉANT2 is supporting a number of joint research activities across Europe. His vision for the GÉANT2 successor is the further provision of optical protection of failed links, flexible service provisioning and cross domain management.

Further research achievements were highlighted by Graham Cameron (Associate Director from EMBL-EBI) who described the importance of access to the EMBL genetic database to significantly reduce laboratory research time in activities such as personalised medicine.