e-AGE2011, 12-14 December 2011, Four Seasons, Amman. Robert Klapisch

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From NRENs to ASREN

e-AGE2011, 12-14 December 2011, Four Seasons, Amman. Robert Klapisch

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National Research and Education Networks

• Allow peer-to-peer communication at no cost between researchers inside a country as well as student access.

• Benefits Education as well as participation to International Research projects

• Two outstanding examples of successful NRENs among Arab states

• Morocco

• Jordan

e-AGE2011, 12-14 December 2011, Four Seasons, Amman. Robert Klapisch

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Marwan in Morocco• Marwan buys bandwidth (VPN)

from a local provider. Costs shared (80/20) with EU.

• A common backbone 45 Mb/s is shared by Universities.Links with Universities: 2-34 Mb/s

• Link with EUMED CONNECT at 155 Mb/s

• Connects 15 000 researchers and professors from 110 institutions and 300 000 students

Has been essential to integrate Morocco into European research. Outstanding success is participation of MA-Grid to ATLAS LHC experiment.

e-AGE2011, 12-14 December 2011, Four Seasons, Amman. Robert Klapisch

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Participating of Morocco to ATLAS, an essential driver

for the success of MaGRID

The computing Center of CNRST (with 20 CPU cores and 7750 Gigabytes storage qualifies as a Tier 3 node of the LHC Grid.

CERN has agreed in principle to give CNRST up to 300 4-year old retired servers. Increasing the capacity of CNRST Computing Center and allowing it to be upgraded to Tier2

Other scientific projects stand to benefit from these possibilities

Moroccan physicists have certificates allowing them to access to events from LHC experiments.

e-AGE2011, 12-14 December 2011, Four Seasons, Amman. Robert Klapisch

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Jordan and its National Broadband Network

• Connects 15 National Universities • Royal Initiative: dark fiber leased at no

cost (IRU) from the National Power Company.

• Each University has 1Gb/s link to the core

• Allows video-conferencing, VoIP, etc.. between universities.

• One common link to Internet at 155 Mb/s

• Link to GEANT at 45 Mb/s• Common Library system.

To process data that will come from SESAME, a high bandwidth link has been established with the Cyprus High Performance Computing Center

e-AGE2011, 12-14 December 2011, Four Seasons, Amman. Robert Klapisch

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Added Benefits of ASREN

• Members: Algeria, Egypt, Morocco, Palestinian Authority, Syria, Tunisia, UAE (not in EUMEDCONNECT)

• Should be able to facilitate cooperative research among Arab states.

• The endorsement of the Arab League gives ASREN a measure of government and financial support which bodes well for its

future.

• Arab States R&D spending is only 0.3% of GDP vs, Finland 3.4%. That means spending 10 USD per cap year in Arab States vs. 1300 USD in Finland.

• To succeed, Arab States should facilitate mobility of researchers (men and women) participating in cooperative research programmes.