Europe

As weather forecasts are becoming increasingly detailed, data volumes are increasing as well, demanding high-speed connectivity and supercomputing power.

Developing alternative, greener energy sources is a key priority across the world but many countries don’t have the infrastructure and skills needed to create renewable energy industries from scratch. Technology, and in particular research networks, can help develop these skills, transferring knowledge to build the industry.

ARES (Advanced networking for the EU genomic Research) is implementing novel genome content distribution solutions to make large data sets accessible to healthcare practitioners for better patient care. Robust and bottleneck-free data networks are key to the success of this vital undertaking.

Eske Willerslev, one of the world’s leading experts in ancient DNA, DNA degradation, and evolutionary biology, is using powerful DNA sequencing technology to reveal fundamentally new insights, reconstructing the past 50.000 years of human history.

The University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences and SURF are collaborating on a campus network infrastructure optimized for sending research data. The aim is to create a blueprint for an architecture to help researchers collaborate on data-intensive research. The first use case is focusing on crop genome data.

The European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) near Cambridge, UK, distributes datasets worldwide using R&E connectivity. This biological data enables the discovery of new drugs, new diagnostics and increasingly new agro-chemicals. The Institute's work, which includes the 1000 Genomes Project, has generated petabytes of data and this growth is showing no signs of abating.

A dedicated line between two supercomputers in Denmark allows biomedical researchers to share data faster and easier than before, helping them carry out their research into the relationship between genetics and psychiatric illnesses.

Slovenian researchers analysed various aspects of the biology of extremophilic fungi, which can act as pathogens that are harmful to humans and used the same methods in their winning solution in data mining for the European Space Agency.

Something the general public is unaware of is that several Swiss research groups were instrumental in proving the existence of the Higgs boson, and all of them rely on SWITCHlan to transfer data.

In 2009, NASA launched the Kepler space observatory to discover Earth-size planets orbiting other stars. For four and a half years, Kepler photographed a small 10-by-10 degrees section of the sky, taking snapshots each minute. "This is a goldmine of data, and we won’t see anything quite like it in the foreseeable future," explains Rasmus Handberg from the Stellar Astrophysics Centre at Aarhus University, Denmark.

Answering questions about the origins of Greek culture and athletics are at the heart of the Mt. Lykaion Excavation and Survey Project in Arcadia, Greece. Collaborative efforts within the R&E networking community have helped make the lives of the many archeologists in the field easier by bringing high-speed internet to the site.

Every year medical students in France take a crucial exam, The National Classifying Exam, which determines the specialization they pursue and often where they will live. To address its shortcomings, this exam has now being modernised and digitized, and the French national research and education network is responsible for mission critical infrastructure.