The “GLORIAD” advanced science internet network was launched in January 2004 by the U.S., China and Russia, and expanded its reach in 2005 – to Korea, Canada and the Netherlands – and in 2006 to the five Nordic countries of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden. The network promotes new opportunities for collaboration and cooperation among scientists, educators and students.
GLORIAD is constructed from a fiber-optic ring of light encircling the northern hemisphere —connecting universities and national laboratories with individual network circuits providing up to 10 Gbps. The network topology expanded in 2006 to provide several ring redundancies; it now represents a true “ring of rings” around the earth – providing richer bandwidth and redundant network paths for improved reliability.
Scientists and engineers cooperatively use this infrastructure to collaborate and conduct research in ways unimagined only a few years ago. The bandwidth is sufficient to transmit entire libraries of information in seconds – or permit thousands of simultaneous video-conferences for distance learning or shared seminars – or enable the sharing of expensive scientific instrumentation. But the real value of GLORIAD is in how it enables literally millions of scientists, educators, policy makers, artists, students to better work together and share resources, data and experiences.
Eight years ago, the seeds of GLORIAD were planted when the U.S. NSF and Russian Ministry of Science agreed to jointly fund the first advanced network linking each countries’ scientists, educators and students. Its organizers and sponsors expanded it in January 2004 when they launced the U.S.-China-Russia “Little GLORIAD” network, completing a literal ring of light around the earth. The network was further expanded in August, 2005 – with a new trans-Pacific segment connecting the US, Korea and China at 10 Gbps (60 times the original capacity). In September 2006, the U.S.-China portion of GLORIAD was upgraded by a factor of 16 – from 155 Mbps to 2.5 Gbps and the US-Russia upgrade to 10 Gbps is being completed during early 2007. GLORIAD’s partners in the Netherlands contributed more than 20 Gbps of capacity connecting the U.S. and Europe. As of 2007, additional capacity across Northern Europe and connecting with Russia has been provided by NORDUnet.
The GLORIAD program (based in the U.S. at the University of Tennessee and Oak Ridge National Laboratory) began in January 2005 a new five-year program funded with a $4.2 million grant from the NSF – as part of an international package of funding with its partners – linking the three founding national partners with partners in Korea, Canada, Netherlands and the Nordic countries – world leaders in advancing network and cyberinfrastructure deployment.
Created to foster increased S&E cooperation, it today enables sharing of the most advanced science and research in the world – in high energy and fusion energy physics, in joint development of new energy sources, studying global climate change, mapping the universe, developing globally linked telescopes, better monitoring earth’s unpredictable seismic activity, creating improved environmental models and monitoring, enabling active cooperation in nuclear materials protection, enabling shared medical knowledge and work – and hundreds if not thousands of others.
The effectiveness of GLORIAD is evident from the dramatically increasing level of utilization of the network and an ever-increasing number of users (scientists, educators, students) in the partnering countries. It was featured in the Super Computing (SC) 2006 conference where GLORIAD partners helped establish new bandwidth records for data transfer. But it’s importance is more evidenced in the over 4,000 partnerships GLORIAD serves every second of every day.
For more information, visit the GLORIAD web site at: http://www.gloriad.org or contact the U.S. principal investigator at the University of Tennessee and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Greg Cole at gcole@gloriad.org.
