International collaboration on research through research networks and other means require sustained funding to make impact on identifying and developing ways to improve quality of everyday lives of people.
Collaboration is nothing new when it comes to successful scientific research. Many of the biggest advances in a wide variety of fields have been the result of international teams pooling their skills and resources. And the success of international collaboration has positive effects on the everyday life of citizens around the world – whether finding cures for diseases, stimulating economic growth or improving education and research. So what is the state of global research collaboration and what is holding it back?
First the good news. Methods for international collaboration are expanding rapidly. At the beginning of this millennium, new, high speed research networks such as GÉANT in Europe, enabled collaboration across particular regions by building regional research communities. GÉANT2, the current generation of the network, operated by DANTE, is the high bandwidth research and education network that connects researchers in 34 countries across Europe, through 30 National Research and Education Networks (NRENs). Our success with the GÉANT network has been replicated in other regions, such as Latin America with the ALICE project and Asia-Pacific with the TEIN2 network, supported by the lessons learned in Europe and funding from the European Union.
However, given the growing complexity of research, the need is now to move beyond regional collaboration, to bring together researchers from around the world, all working together to tackle major issues such as climate change and researching cures for diseases such as AIDS and cancer, as well as local issues such as agriculture and flooding.
The challenge is that while researchers are located around the world, the facilities and technology to link them varies greatly from country to country. Most significantly, the price of network bandwidth is much greater in Africa than in Europe or the US, limiting the capabilities of local researchers and causing them to move to wealthier regions to carry out their work. This type of brain drain migration can have a knock-on effect on the development of local research communities and consequently impact the overall economy of particular countries. However, things are starting to change as far as parts of Africa are concerned. The southern Mediterranean countries have been connected to GÉANT for several years now. Most recently, the implementation of a connection between the Ubuntunet alliance, a research and education network backbone for Sub-Saharan Africa, and GEANT2 is an indication that a truly worldwide approach to research co-operation could become a reality.
The global situation is improving, albeit slowly. New NRENs are springing up all over the world, providing the structures needed to support local and regional links between universities and research centres. This is creating a culture that provides the building blocks of skilled staff and infrastructure but what is really needed is money to ensure that high speed networks move off the drawing board into reality. Funding from external bodies such as the European Union and equipment provided by vendors is enabling regional networks, such and GÉANT2, TEIN2 and ALICE to operate, but the high price of bandwidth to connect to the global research community has yet to be overcome.
The other issue that research networks face is the sheer amount of data that collaboration creates. Major experiments now involve many petabytes of data, which need to travel between hundreds of researchers around the world, often in real time. To handle the explosion in data, new point-to-point networking technologies, as used in GÉANT2, are able to link scientists in real time, through dedicated, high capacity links many times faster than commercial broadband connections. Through this guaranteed bandwidth, supported by end-to-end performance monitoring, point-to-point networks allow scientists from multiple locations to share information and work together.
For example, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the largest scientific experiment ever undertaken, will create 15 million gigabytes of data every per year when it goes live later this year, which will need to be transmitted to 5,000 scientists working in 500 institutes worldwide. Handling this vast amount of data and delivering it to researchers is critical to the success of the LHC. The LHC Computing project is using a global computing grid infrastructure to achieve this, which relies on guaranteed, high capacity point-to-point connections between the 12 LHC primary processing centres around the world. Point-to-point links provide dedicated paths created between demanding users that guarantee high speed connectivity through reserved capacity to researchers. This avoids congestion and guarantees high quality service. DANTE as the operator of GÉANT2, is a key player in this worldwide collaboration, and is involved with the operation and implementation of the LHC Optical Private Network (OPN) using GÉANT2 and global point-to-point links. These include the transatlantic point-to-point connection between Fermilab in the US and IN2P3 in France.
Astronomy is another research activity that is benefiting from dedicated point-to-point links. Astronomers across Europe can now track events faster and in more detail across the known universe through the European Union’s EXPReS project. Using GÉANT2, four of Europe’s biggest radio telescopes are now linked using high bandwidth, point-to-point links, effectively creating a single telescope as large as Europe. The EXPReS project brings together telescopes in Medicina, Italy; Torun, Poland and Jodrell Bank and Cambridge in the UK, all linked to a central supercomputer in the Netherlands using dedicated point-to-point links on the GÉANT2 network. This enables astronomers to react to events as they happen – including supernovae explosions and gamma ray bursts, providing insight into previously unseen and unmeasurable astronomical phenomena.
Along with telemedicine, cultural research and earth observation projects, these examples show the many possibilities for global collaboration, with scientists and researchers looking more and more to work together across the world. To do this they need the infrastructure of high speed research networks that seamlessly interconnect and bring the global community together, irrespective of location. As more is invested in networking this is becoming a reality, but funding needs to be sustained if real benefits are to be delivered. Only then will the success of international collaboration have positive effects on the everyday life of people around the world by contributing to new treatments for diseases, helping to predict climate change, and stimulating economic growth.
For more information:
www.dante.net
www.geant2.net
www.lhc.ac.uk
