One year of the GÉANT2 network

In Poland, the partner of the GÉANT2 network is the Poznań Supercomputing and Networking Center, which connects the PIONIER network – the Polish Optical Internet – with the pan-European research network. The GÉANT2 network node located in Poznań enables Polish scientists and students to access distributed resources, allowing for advanced research not only in Europe but practically all over the world. Those who have benefited most from access to this state-of-the-art infrastructure include scientists working on weather forecasting and climate change, radio astronomers, high-energy physicists, computer scientists dealing with distributed computing (so-called grids), and researchers studying the issues of so-called sustainable growth.

The GÉANT2 network was first launched in June 2005 and is co-financed by the European Commission and 30 national research and education networks. The entire network is managed by the DANTE organization in Cambridge, which also manages direct connections with similar networks on other continents: USA (Internet2 and ESnet), Asia (TEIN2), China (ORIENT), Japan (SINET), South America (ALICE-RedCLARA), and Mediterranean countries (EUMEDCONNECT). Currently, work is underway to connect Eastern European countries to the GÉANT2 network. These works are also coordinated by the Poznań Supercomputing and Networking Center as part of the PORTA OPTICA project, funded by the European Union.

Very importantly, the Polish infrastructure – the PIONIER network, the Polish Optical Internet – is in no way inferior to the parameters of the GÉANT2 network. Both infrastructures allow data to be transmitted at a speed of approx. 10 Gb/s – a speed that allows for the transmission of over 1000 photos in 1 second. On some sections, the PIONIER network even allows data to be transmitted at a speed of 2x10Gb/s using DWDM technology, i.e., wavelength division multiplexing, which makes it possible to transmit even larger amounts of information. It can therefore be said that the network, built over the last 5 years with funds from the Ministry of Science and Informatization, has allowed for closing the gap that separated the Polish scientific community from scientists in Western European countries. It seems that this infrastructure is one of the most successful Polish investments.