14 DAY TRIAL // Europe's GEANT, the world's highest-speed computer network is currently linking up with other computer infrastructure in order to create a global research super-network. The statement has been issued by the European Commission at a recent meeting in Brussels.
The GEANT network is a multi-gigabit computer network oriented towards research and education, and currently links some smaller educational networks in the world's most remote places such as Reykjavik or Vladivostok. It serves about 30 million users at the most important educational facilities around Europe, and it has partnerships with over 3500 universities and research centers.
"With GEANT's massive data processing capacity, Europe can now bring together the best minds in the world to tackle the challenges that we all face. Europe's financial investment in a high speed backbone network for research - around ?23 million per year - benefits Europe's competitiveness, but is also boosting collaboration between researchers on a global scale," said Viviane Reding, EU Commissioner for Information Society and Media. "By investing a further ?90 million up to 2012 in the 3rd generation GEANT, the EU is committed to staying at the forefront of the Internet's evolution, and to making scientific collaboration seamless and straightforward."
The network will establish high-speed links with other small-scale research computer-driven infrastructures with headquarters in Balkans, the Black Sea and Mediterranean regions, as well Asia, Southern Africa and Latin America. The main purpose of the expansion is creating a research community that will penetrate the European continent and stretch its limbs on a global scale.
The expansion will be financed through European funds, and the commission has announced that it will invest more than 90 million euros (136 million dollars) in order to have the project completed until 2012. The GEANT network is already a state-of-the-art technological achievement comprised of a total of 50,000 kilometres of super-fast 'dark' fiber-optic connections linked to hybrid networking technology, that can "pump" data at dazzling rates of 320 gigabits per second.
The GEANT network is already "responsible" for providing "huge technological advances for big science," such as the EXPReS project, an EU radio-astronomy initiative that interconnects the world's largest radio telescopes in China, Europe, South Africa and Chile to a Netherlands-based supercomputer.