GÉANT, the superfast pan-European research network that helped discover the Higgs Boson, announced that it could reach speeds up to 2Tbps (terabits per second) thanks to a major network upgrade. Capacity of up to 500Gbps is now available across the core network. This means individual users across 32,000 universities, higher education institutes, research institutes, schools, libraries, museums, national archives and hospitals can transfer data at speeds of up to 100Gbps.
Malta, through the University of Malta, is a member of GÉANT.
Neelie Kroes, Vice President of the European Commission, said: “We need high speed and high capacity to keep in the global research race. The data side of the research equation is almost as important as the research itself today. With this upgrade, GÉANT demonstrates it is the leader of the research network pack.”
Speeds like this will enable faster collaboration on critical projects and meet the rapidly increasing demand for data transfer capacity. The creation and sharing of research data is increasing exponentially, impacting the ICT infrastructures in particular research networks. Major projects involving global partners generate massive amounts of data that need to be distributed, analysed, stored and accessed.
With today’s high speeds the GÉANT network will provide the essential capacity to support all scientific disciplines: from high-energy physics and deep space research to those addressing societal challenges like ageing populations, disease diagnosis and climate change.
GÉANT’s goal is to ensure 99.999 per cent availability through the rapid identification and resolution of network errors and powerful security features to detect and prevent malicious attacks.
The European Commission currently provides funding for the GÉANT network of € 41.8 million.
GÉANT is co-funded by the European Union (EU) and Europe’s National Research and Education Networks (NRENs), and seeks to promote the free movement of scientific data and knowledge by connecting and empowering research and education communities within Europe and other world regions.
2Tbps represents the maximum capacity of the system between two points of the backbone.
This new phase of the upgraded high speed network is known as GN3plus. The GÉANT network connects 38 NREN partners serving 43 countries, together reaching in excess of 50,000,000 end users from more than 10,000 universities, higher education institutes, research institutes, libraries, museums, national archives, hospitals, etc. and a further 22,000 primary and secondary schools. It is operated by DANTE (UK), which leads the project consortium of 41 partners.
GÉANT also offers connectivity to 65 countries outside of Europe, reaching all continents through the TEIN (Asia Pacific and South Asia), EUMEDCONNECT (Mediterranean), RedCLARA (Latin America), CAREN (Central Asia), C@ribnet (Caribbean) and UbuntuNet (Southern and Eastern Africa) networks as well as the North American, Chinese and Japanese networks.
www.geant.net