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G?ant2 Helps Drive High Speed Supercomputer Projects

The Distributed European Infrastructure for Supercomputing Applications has increased connectivity speeds ten-fold to 10 Gbps, through dedicated links designed and deployed by the G?ANT2 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).

G?ANT2 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.

G?ANT2 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 (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 G?ANT2 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.



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