Consortium GARR and the European National Research and Education Networks Optical Infrastructure Developments
Mauro Campanella, M. Carboni · Fiber & Integrated Optics · 2008
GARR is engineering its next generation of the Italian Research and Education Network (GARR-X), which will exploit a countrywide optical infrastructure based on DWDM equipment and advanced multi-domain services. The trend is common in all National Research and Education Networks [1 TERENA NREN Compendium. http://www.terena.org/activities/compendium ISSN 1569-4496 [Google Scholar]] in Europe and worldwide. NRENs are relying more and more on direct use of optical equipment to fulfill the researchers' requirements. These hybrid networks are built to provide services on a multi-domain environment both at the circuit and at the IP layer for researchers in, for example, radio astronomy (eVLBI [2 European Very Long Baseline Interferometry http://www.evlbi.org [Google Scholar]]), GRID computing (EGEE [3 Enabling Grids for E-sciencE http://public.eu-egee.org [Google Scholar]], LHC [4 The Large Hadron Collider http://lhc.web.cern.ch/lhc [Google Scholar]]), high-performance computing (DEISA [5 The Distributed European Infrastructure for Supercomputing Applications http://www.deisa.org [Google Scholar]]). This article outlines the status and issues of ongoing research activities in GARR [6 http://www.garr.it/garr-b-home-engl.shtmlConsortium GARR, the Italian NREN [Google Scholar]] and NRENs to provide, manage, and evolve dedicated optical-based networks for providing multi-domain end-to-end services. The research is performed mainly in the framework of the European Commission co-funded project GÉANT2 [7 The pan-European R&E network http://www.geant2.net [Google Scholar]].