The Works of DANTE - Issue 5

Focus on: The ALICE Project

 An extension to the ALICE project was recently announced, with funding secured until 2007. We spoke to Cathrin Stöver, the ALICE project manager, to find out what impact the continuation would have.

How long has the project been extended for and how much is the continuation worth?

The project has been extended for 10 months. ALICE was originally planned to run from June 2003 to the end of May 2006 and has now been extended to 31 March 2007. The extension is within the original project budget and will allow the partners to make use of the entire funds available to ALICE.

What will the money be spent on?

Most of the money will be spent on the connectivity which RedCLARA offers in Latin America and its trans-Atlantic interconnection to GÉANT2.

But ALICE is more than an interconnection project. The ALICE project partners will also be able to further develop and execute the training programme for engineers mainly in those Latin American NRENs that have recently started their operations. In January 2006, we carried out a local training course in Cuenca, Ecuador which was attended by about 45 Ecuadorian engineers working in the universities and institutions connected to the Ecuadorian NREN, CEDIA. The one week training programme was carried out by CLARA engineers and focused on advanced routing and was very well received by the engineers. This local training is in addition to the training that ALICE funds at the bi-annual CLARA technical meetings. Last year, the ALICE project funded training on Security, IPv6, VoIP and video-conferencing during the CLARA Technical meetings in Mexico and Venezuela. The training is always coordinated and carried out by CLARA-Tec, CLARA’s technical management group.

What developments will now be possible because of the extension?

 Please remember that RedCLARA is a very young network and CLARA, as the organisation to develop Latin American research networking, is a very young organisation. RedCLARA will be able to mature in the next year. The CLARA Network Engineering Group and the CLARA Network Operations Centre will be able to improve the operations of the network and introduce new services into the backbone. As for CLARA, the extension will allow it to develop further as an organisation and to achieve complete independence from DANTE which at the moment is running most of the administration of the ALICE project and the RedCLARA network.

One also has to see that those NRENs that have connected to RedCLARA in the past three months, like Guatemala, El Salvador, Ecuador and Colombia, have been given extra time to positively establish themselves as organisations in their countries and to prove to their funding members the usefulness of being connected to RedCLARA. This is decisive as for these countries it is the first time that their universities and research institutions have direct access to an international research network backbone. Time is needed to study the impact such a connection has on the research and education communities in these countries and to ensure that benefits can be demonstrated.

What projects will benefit?

The benefit to existing projects that rely on the RedCLARA infrastructure and the interconnection to GÉANT2 was one of the main points of the argument for the extension. The @LIS demonstration projects that typically have partners in Europe and Latin America are running well into 2007and some of these projects are using RedCLARA and the interconnection to GÉANT2 for their data communications. These are for example the @LIS-TechNet project in which various European and Latin America universities collaborate to create innovative teaching platforms, or the T@lemed project which is focusing in the area of public health.

But in addition, there are several projects now where the EC has awarded IST funding to partners in Latin America and Europe for collaborative projects in Grids (EELA), Astronomy (AUGERACCESS) and e-VLBI (EXPReS). These projects count on the RedCLARA and GÉANT2 infrastructures.

A number of these projects involve close collaboration with European partners. Will the link to Europe be increased in capacity?

The RedCLARA link to Europe is currently at STM-4 speed, i.e. at 622Mbps. This capacity has now been available for slightly over a year. I believe that we will soon need to look at the dimensioning of the transatlantic link and also of the RedCLARA ring between the PoPs in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Panama and Mexico. In fact, the ALICE project will fund a study on the availability of dark fibre in Latin America which is to be carried out by CLARA during early 2006. This study should give us a good indication how RedCLARA can grow in the future.

The CLARA partners are currently building a user database. Can you tell us more about this, and what results have been achieved so far?

 This is a very ambitious project, but it is fundamental to understanding the RedCLARA user base. On behalf of CLARA and the ALICE project, the Chilean partner, REUNA has been building a database to gather information on projects and users that are working in international collaborative projects, thus making use of RedCLARA. The work on the database itself is done, but it will now need to be populated. To that end, the Latin American ALICE partners are currently committed to install local copies of this distributed database which will then allow each NREN to input their national data. There is still quite a lot of work to be done, but I believe that it is essential for the future of RedCLARA and CLARA’s relation to the end-user in Latin America.