Czech Science Connects to World at 100 Gbps

CESNET association upgrades direct link to GÉANT research community

Prague, 21 January 2016. The CESNET association has provided the country’s science and research community with a direct 100 Gbps physical connection with what is currently the world’s most powerful infrastructure: the Pan-European GÉANT network. The connection speed until now was 30 Gbps, which was no longer sufficient for the scientists; high saturation used to occur at peak times. The more than triple speed increase is not the only technological advantage, though. Unlike the current solution, the previous connection did not enable transmission of separate data flows greater than 10 Gbps. The shift to the 100 gigabit technology opens a path to development of new demanding applications.

“Czech experts in various disciplines thus obtain excellent communication quality throughout the European research area thanks to the CESNET national e-infrastructure, or more precisely its backbone optical network CESNET2. As a result of this, they can carry out the most demanding tasks and contribute to the most advanced international scientific and research projects,” said Jan Gruntorád, CESNET Director.

GÉANT is connecting our continent with the rest of the world, supports global research and will assist with further development of Europe. Like the European research and education networks (NREN, including domestic CESNET), it serves the European expert community, namely 50 million users working in over 10,000 institutions throughout the continent. It is used, among others, by the institutes of CERN, the European Southern Observatory, the intergovernmental European organisation developing and operating meteorological satellites EUMETSAT, and the European Molecular Biology Laboratory.

High-speed networks found applications in the Czech Republic in many disciplines: high-energy physics, biotechnologies, meteorology, astronomy, and more. They are typically employed to execute on-line broadcasts of medical operations, sometimes even across continents, at which CESNET belongs among the best in the world. The cardinal increase in the speed of connection to the GÉANT network will enable even higher quality of such broadcasts than before.

However, super-fast connections are also useful in the art domain. Recently, there has been experimentation with so-called remote cyber performances. Musicians, for example, perform on the same stage without being all physically present: each of them may be in a different corner of the world and their art is transmitted on-line precisely using these advanced infrastructures. A specific demand for such transmissions is the need for very low delays even when linking areas up to several thousand kilometres apart. CESNET has successfully executed several such cyber performances.

GÉANT is a leading European project focused on networks and related infrastructure and services intended for research and education, which contributes to Europe’s economic growth and competitiveness. It develops, supplies and promotes modern networks and related services and supports innovation and sharing of knowledge among members, partners and the wider research and education network community. Thanks to the super-fast network and integrated set of services, such as securing, verification of data, permissions and identity, GÉANT offers trust and reliability, which are essential for cooperation on extensive research, data-demanding scientific projects, digital clusters and clouds (including the European Open Science cloud), etc. GÉANT has 41 member countries, is owned by the core of its members from NREN and also has affiliated members, who include commercial organisations and multi-national research infrastructure and projects. GÉANT is co-funded by the European Commission. The project phase known as GN4-1 is being implemented at present; two months ago, the European Commission confirmed a grant agreement amounting to 25 million euros for it. Visit www.geant.org for details.

The CESNET Association was founded by Czech universities and the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic in 1996. It is engaged in research and development in information and communication technologies and builds and develops the CESNET national e-infrastructure for research and education. With its research activities and accomplishments, CESNET represents the Czech Republic in international projects, most notably the pan-European GÉANT network building project and grid projects (EGI.eu), and participates actively in their implementation. The association also works on the use of high-speed networks for sharing multimedia data both through synchronous video conferencing and shared applications, and asynchronous streaming.

Last change: 14.11.2017