The Works of DANTE - Issue 6

Welcome

Welcome to the Autumn/Winter 2006 edition of The Works of DANTE. This edition features news on extending GÉANT2 connectivity to India, an update on the status of the network, and details of exciting research that is making volcanoes sing!

News from TEIN2 reports on an endorsement of its efforts by heads of state from Asia and Europe, at the recent ASEM6 Summit in Helsinki. Looking to Latin America, ALICE has been actively supporting the emerging grid community in the region. Representatives have been attending academic conferences to give updates on RedCLARA’s status and working closely with grid specialists to support their research.
 
GÉANT2 continues to tackle the challenge of easing the transition between research activity and service deployment. The first perfSONAR workshop was held recently in Greece to give training and guidance to engineers from the NRENs.  perfSONAR has been developed by GÉANT2, Internet2 and ESnet, and has created advanced networking monitoring tools. These operate across the multiple-domains involved in international collaboration, making it easier to identify and resolve problems on the end-to-end performance path.

“A Day at DANTE” talks to Marian Garcia Vidondo, DANTE’s Operations Manager, to find out more about the challenges of building and running a network on the scale of GÉANT2.

FCCN, the Portuguese NREN, celebrates its 20th anniversary this October. In recognition of this, we interviewed Executive Chairman, Pedro Veiga, to find out how Portuguese research networking has changed in that time.

In other community news, we report on how Swiss students are now able to learn on the move. The Swiss NREN, SWITCH, has added podcasting capability to its streaming services. Students can now download lectures and video to their mp3 players so the learning can continue outside of the classroom.

We welcome your comments and feedback on this edition. You can contact the team at www.dante.net/feedback