ORIENT: Connecting Academic Networks in China and Europe

   Key Points

• ORIENT is a collaborative Sino-European project to connect the research and education networks of China and Europe.
  
  
• Jointly funded from China and Europe, the project has procured and currently operates a high capacity data-communication link between the pan-European GÉANT backbone network and Chinese research and education networks.
  
  
• ORIENT is a product of collaboration between the European Commission, six European NRENs, CERNET and DANTE, the operator of GÉANT.
  
  
• The project officially started on 1 March 2006, and will procure and operate an advanced high-capacity network link between the two world regions, meeting the needs of many demanding research collaborations.
  
  
• The CERNET and CSTNET networks will support the implementation of a direct connection to GÉANT with bandwidth of 2.5Gbps over the trans-Siberian route. Chinese government funding will provide 50% of the cost of the link. The remainder is met by the European NRENs (25%) and the European Commission (25%).
  
  
• The project works in the context of complementary initiatives such as TEIN3, which provides an Asia-Pacific regional network which also links to Europe. It is intended that the significant synergies between the two projects can be exploited, bringing bandwidth and reliability benefits to the users of both ORIENT and TEIN3.

The Need

Research and education activities rely heavily on the availability of a leading-edge network infrastructure in support of their IT requirements. In Europe, national investment by the NRENs is complemented, on a pan-European and global scale, by connectivity provided by GÉANT, the network supported under the European Commission’s 7th Framework Programme.

As research co-operation becomes increasingly global, it is vital that global connectivity is provided to support collaboration between researchers in different world regions and that such an infrastructure is made available to the individual research users. This is increasingly true for joint Sino-European initiatives.

China is the world’s most populous nation and has recently experienced rapid growth both economically and in the research and education sector. The coordinators are aware of research projects in the fields of Radio Astronomy, Meteorology, Sustainable Development, High Energy Physics, Cosmic Ray Observation and Grid Computing with requirements for high-speed connectivity between the research networks of China and Europe. In Europe the link will be complemented by the provision of point-to-point services as part of GÉANT2. In addition, in order to guarantee and demonstrate network performance, measurement devices are increasingly being deployed to create a monitoring infrastructure.

The Main Objective

The main objective of the project is to provide appropriate connectivity between research and education sites in Europe and their counterparts in China. Additional objectives aim to ensure the extension of the enhanced services and service support infrastructure of GÉANT, to services over ORIENT. Dissemination activities will aim to raise awareness of the project amongst the academic community, fostering ties and creating ‘people networks’ across the two world regions.

The role of DANTE

The role of DANTE, the co-ordinating partner, will be in the overall management of the project and in the procurement activity. It will also take the lead role in activities relating to dissemination and user support. CERNET will jointly take responsibility for implementation and operation of the circuit. All partners in the project contribute to engineering and user support of their network customers and dissemination activities within their own regions of network coverage, such as NREN conferences. All partners also contribute by presenting at international events and joint distribution of dissemination materials.

The User Community

Projects which aim to use the ORIENT circuit include the following:

• EXPReS, a radio astronomy project, aims to expand the scope of eVLBI (electronic Very Long Baseline Interferometry) throughout Europe and beyond. ORIENT will help connect the EXPReS project partner, the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory, to its European counterparts.
  
• The EUChinaGrid Overview project also has a special interest in a connection between European and Chinese research networks. EUChinaGrid is a grid computing project, joining computational resources in China and Europe and facilitating data transfer and processing between the two regions.

ORIENT also hopes to serve researchers in the field of Cosmic Ray Observation. The ARGO-YBJ project is keen to see an operational connection to its site at YangBaJing in Tibet, China. Benedetto D’Ettorre Piazzoli, spokesman for ARGO-YBJ, expressed his support for the initiative: "Such a connection between China and Europe is of high value, not only from the point of view of the ARGO-YBJ experiment, but more generally to provide an adequate support to the Europe-China GRID projects".

One of the project’s objectives is to identify existing Chinese-European collaborative projects and to encourage their usage of the infrastructure provided by ORIENT. It is also hoped that the existence of this infrastructure will encourage new collaborations, otherwise impractical or even impossible without a dedicated research network link.