One small step for GÉANT, one giant leap for the Black Sea region
Tuesday 17 March 2009, Cambridge, UK: A news release was issued today by the EC in Brussels, to announce the availability of high bandwidth, internet capacity to researchers across the South Caucasus region.
The EU-funded regional research and education network Black Sea Interconnection (BSI), which links the South Caucasus countries (Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia) and connects them to the high bandwidth, world-leading, pan-European GÉANT network that already serves 30 million researchers, was launched today. This new connection will enable researchers and students to collaborate with their European peers in 40 countries, by sharing large amounts of data over the network.
For the full press release, click here.
Further comments
“Turkey is proud to lead such an important project in such a critical region and also to see the realisation of a regional network among the South Caucasian National Research and Education Networks”, said Prof. Nüket Yetiş, President of the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey. “We believe this initial step towards the integration of the whole Black Sea Region to the European scientific community will stimulate collaboration between partner countries and serve as a model for regional development.”
“The BSI project provides the next step forward in collaboration across not just the Black Sea Region but to the global research community,” said Jean-François Bureau, Assistant Secretary General for Public Diplomacy of NATO. “We welcome the introduction of increased network capacity and look forward to working alongside the BSI project to deliver advanced infrastructure to the regional research community.”
Armenian Prime Minister, Mr Tigran Sargsyan, stated, “Our researchers and students have previously found their efforts at collaboration hampered by a lack of high speed connectivity within the region, and vitally to Europe. IT development is the most important task to achieve the Armenian government’s primary goal of the national economy being driven by science and modern technology. The BSI project will provide the infrastructure we need to share knowledge amongst our peers, to enlarge scientific research collaboration and bring new technology and science to Armenia.”
Georgian Vice Prime Minister George Baramidze said, “BSI is the most important step in the last few years to integrate the Georgian research and education community in Europe. It will make it possible for Georgian scientists to run complex applications such as GRID computing and provide access to world-class experiments like the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN.”
Azerbaijan Minister of Telecommunication and IT Professor Ali Abasov said, “The BSI project is of crucial importance for our scientific community, which consists of 36 research institutes and 20 universities, whose needs are growing rapidly. BSI is a much needed complementary contribution to our country’s ICT strategy, which is the realisation of President Ilham Aliev’s vision to make ICT the second most important area of our economy, after oil.”
About the BSI:
The Black Sea Interconnection (BSI) project stems from earlier EC-funded project “Porta Optica” and replaces the NATO-funded “Virtual Silk Highway” which provided satellite connections to provide high speed and high capacity internet connection to GÉANT for the South Caucasus and Central Asia, but was unable to meet the ever increasing connectivity and collaboration needs of the scientific community.
The project is coordinated by the Turkish National Research and Education Network, TÜBİTAK-ULAKBİM – the largest project coordinated by Turkey in the Commission's overall FP7 Research Programme. It involves the South Caucasian National Research and Education Networks: GRENA (Georgia), AzRENA (Azerbaijan) and ASNET-AM/ARENA (Armenia).
For more information, please visit www.blacksea-net.org
GÉANT2 is an advanced pan-European data communication backbone network that interconnects National Research and Education Networks (NRENs) across Europe. With an estimated 30 million research and education users in 36 countries across the continent connected via the NRENs, GÉANT2 offers unrivalled geographical coverage, high bandwidth, innovative hybrid networking technology and a range of user-focused services, making it the most advanced international network in the world. Together with the NRENs it connects, GÉANT2 has links totalling more than 50,000km in length and its extensive geographical reach interconnects networks in other world regions to enable global research collaboration. Europe’s academics and researchers can exploit dedicated GÉANT2 point-to-point links, creating optical private networks that connect specific research centres.
GÉANT2 is co-funded by the European Commission under the EU’s Sixth Research and Development Framework Programme. The project partners are 30 European National Research and Education Networks (NRENs), TERENA and DANTE. GÉANT2 is operated by DANTE on behalf of Europe’s NRENs.
For further information please contact:
Helen Martindale
DANTE
Direct: +44 (0)1223 371 328
Mobile: +44 (0)7823 538090
helen.martindale@dante.org.uk
