CESNET Large Infrastructure

CESNET Large Infrastructure is a strategic five-year project of the CESNET association which started in 2011. The project is funded by the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports of the Czech Republic as one of the high-priority projects described in the Roadmap for Large Research, Development and Innovation Infrastructures in the Czech Republic – Czech response to the ESFRI Roadmap.

The CESNET Large Infrastructure project builds on a previous CESNET research project named Optical National Research Network and Its New Applications. Its major goal is to develop the Czech national research and education network into a rich infrastructure encompassing all information an communication components required by the research community to participate in European and worldwide research programmes and projects. There are four major components of the project:

Components

Communication infrastructure

is the essential basis for other e-infrastructure components. The project’s principal task is to create a multi-layer national communication infrastructure that will be interconnected at the individual layers with user networks as well as with national research networks abroad, the European GÉANT network and the global experimental infrastructure. It will offer its users, for example, simultaneous support for IPv4 and IPv6 with special advanced configuration options or the provision of dedicated services at the individual layers, in particular lambda services or real-time remote access to user research equipment. Its basis will be a fibre infrastructure allowing transfer rates of 40 Gbps and higher.

Grids

will become a fully featured national grid infrastructure (NGI) by developing and rebuilding CESNET’s current grid activities, namely the MetaCentrum project. The task is to interconnect newly purchased computing devices within the Czech academic community (especially clusters that are being put into operation by various scientific groups) and to provide uniform and barrier-free access to them at the national and international levels. Another very important element of building the NGI is integration with the European environment of the EGI (European Grid Initiative).

Data storage

capacities will be provided in two closely related areas. One involves data repositories for clusters and the computational grid in general; the other covers repositories for scientific, educational and related general data. From the user’s perspective, the project’s plan in the area of general storage capacities is to provide an “unlimited” storage capacity, implemented as a Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM) solution. It combines large storage capacities on magnetic tapes with front-end disk arrays.

Collaborative environment

will provide an infrastructure allowing collaboration without extensive travelling, making it much more efficient and environmentally friendly. The project focuses mainly on building and operating a backbone infrastructure and promoting the involvement of research teams. In addition, it will ensure environment coordination and standardization between individual institutions. Connected institutions will receive support at the user and technical levels in the form of training courses and seminars.

Contact

Project manager: Ing. Helmut Sverenyak
Contact e-mail: vi@cesnet.cz

Last change: 18.8.2015