published on Thursday, June 14, 2007

GÉANT2 helps drive high-speed computer projects

Cambridge, UK, 14 June 2007 - The speed of collaborative research using Europe's network of supercomputers will be advanced by a major upgrade announced today. The Distributed European Infrastructure for Supercomputing Applications (DEISA), has increased connectivity speeds ten-fold to 10 Gbps, through dedicated links designed and deployed by the GÉANT2 pan-European research and education network.

This will allow researchers in projects such as SEISSOL (research into earthquake simulations) and COMSIMM (looking at current and future climate trends) to harness the combined processing power of DEISA's 200 teraflops of supercomputing infrastructure. Requests for supercomputing resources amongst scientific research domains are on the increase, with 23 projects scheduled for operation in 2007. Amongst these applications, projects in progress include ICAROS (stratospheric ozone research, climate change), gyro3d (plasma instability) and HELIUM (radiation-matter interactions).

GÉANT2 is the largest research and education network ever built in Europe. Extending over 50,000 km, it connects 34 countries on the continent and has extensive links to North America and Asia. Managed by international research and education network provider DANTE, it is co-funded by Europe's National Research and Education Networks (NRENs) and the European Commission.

GÉANT2 and its partner NRENs currently connect seven DEISA sites across Europe - BSC (Spain), IDRIS (France), FZJ, HLRS, LRZ, RZG (all Germany) and SARA (The Netherlands) via dedicated 10 Gbps wavelengths, all managed by a central switch. Sites including CINECA (Italy), CSC, the Finnish IT center for science (Finland), EPCC (UK) and ECMWF (UK) are scheduled for connection by mid-2007.

DEISA provides leading scientific researchers with access to a European cluster of state-of-the-art High Performance Computing (HPC) resources. The “private network” of point-to-point links deployed by GÉANT2 will enable researchers to gain faster and more efficient access to DEISA's shared file system, supporting ground-breaking applications in computational sciences. DEISA's aim is to create an integrated European HPC ecosystem before the end of the decade.

Victor Alessandrini, Project Director, DEISA says: “The underlying aim of the DEISA project is to enable scientific discovery across a broad spectrum of science and technology. By exploiting the point-to-point connections that GÉANT2 provides, we're able to create a high speed, integrated European supercomputing environment. This will enable us to share the massive computational resources that are needed for efficiency and performance.“

“The DEISA supercomputing environment will deliver a vital resource for the European research community, said Hans Döbbeling, General Manager, DANTE. “By using GÉANT2's point-to-point connections, DEISA can ensure its users are able to maximise usage of Europe's supercomputing resources.”

About GÉANT2:
GÉANT2 delivers the next generation research and education network for Europe. With over 30 million research and education users in 34 countries across the continent, GÉANT2 offers unrivalled geographical coverage, high bandwidth, innovative hybrid networking technology and a range of user-focused services. Its network footprint maps more than 50,000 km and its extensive geographical reach interconnects with other world regions, enabling global research collaboration. Europe's academics and researchers can now exploit the power of dedicated GÉANT2 “point-to-point” links, creating optical private networks solely for their use, that connect specific research centres.

GÉANT2 is co-funded by the European Commission under the Sixth Research and Development Framework Programme. The project partners are 30 European National Research and Education Networks (NRENs), TERENA and DANTE. It is co-ordinated by DANTE, the research networking organisation that plans, manages and builds research networks all over the world.

For more information visit: www.geant2.net

About DEISA:
DEISA is a EU funded distributed supercomputing environment consisting of 11 of Europe's supercomputers. It deploys and operates a number of services that enable the cooperative operation of all the national leading supercomputing platforms, and the high performance access to remote data repositories. The DEISA infrastructure's aggregated computing power is over 190 Teraflops. Focused on the advancement of science in Europe, DEISA has moved in three years from the support of an initial set of early users in various areas of science (Material Sciences, Cosmology, Fusion Research, Life Sciences, Computational Fluid Dynamics, and Environmental Sciences) to a full scale support of leading, demanding, Grand Challenge applications in all areas of science and technology that could not come to life otherwise. This is implemented through the DEISA Extreme Computing Initiative, launched in 2005 and reiterated in 2006. New Call for Proposals opened on April 30, 2007, for the third generation DECI projects.

For more information, please visit www.deisa.org

About DANTE:
DANTE is a non-profit organisation whose primary mission is to plan, build and manage research and education networks. Established in 1993, DANTE has been fundamental to the success of pan-European research and education networking. DANTE has built and operates GÉANT2 which provides the data communications infrastructure essential to the success of many research projects in Europe. DANTE is involved in worldwide initiatives to interconnect countries in other regions to one another and to GÉANT2. DANTE currently manages projects focused on the Mediterranean, Latin American and Asia-Pacific regions through the EUMEDCONNECT, ALICE and TEIN2 (Trans-Eurasia Information Network) projects respectively.

For more information, please visit: www.dante.net

Editorial contacts:
Chris Measures/Clodagh Boyle/Paul Allen
Rainier PR (on behalf of DANTE)
+44(0)20 7494 6570
dante@rainierpr.co.uk