News & Events

The first of a series of e-infrastructure workshops were held from 16-20 June, in Sofia, Bulgaria, targeting countries in the Eastern Partnership region specifically. Almost 50 people from universities, libraries and NRENs (national research and education networks) from ten Partnership and other Eastern European countries participated. Further workshops will follow later in the year.

According to an article published on the TERENA website, during TNC2014, in addition to the conference programme many side-events will be organised. For some of those you need to register, so don't forget to check our events page. Online registration for the conference itself will be available until 9 May. After 9 May only on-site registration will be possible at the event location in Dublin.

Africa as a region and as individual countries, is slowly making a steady progress towards establishing national and Regional Research and Educational Networks (RRENs). Although still in its infancy compared to other world regions such as Europe where each country has an active National Research and Educational Networks (NRENs) with established regional networks such as TERENA, iMENTORS database provides evidence for tremendous progress over the past few years.

Image courtesy of Stuart Miles / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

There are currently three RRENs in Africa namely; West and Central African Research and Education Network (WACREN), Ubuntu Alliance which consists of Eastern and Southern African countries,  and the North African block which belongs to Arab States Research and Education Network (ASREN).

Overal, iMENTORS has mapped 23 individual NRENs, 13 of which are members of Ubuntu Alliance, 6 WACREN members and 4 ASREN members. Check out our map!

The TERENA Networking Conference (TNC) is the largest and most prestigious European research networking conference, with more than 650 participants attending this annual event. TNC brings together decision makers, managers, networking and collaboration specialists, and identity and access management experts from all major European networking and research organisations, universities, worldwide sister institutions, as well as industry representatives.

TERENA and SURFnet kindly invite you to the second VAMP workshop on September 30th & October 1st, 2013 in Espoo, Finland. Espoo is situated in the Helsinki Metropolitan area.

The TERENA Trusted Cloud Drive (TCD) platform should focus on turning personal cloud storage facilities of national research and education networking organisations (NRENs) and universities into trusted services that offer academia alternative storage solutions for data that might pose an unacceptable risk if it were to come into the possession of a foreign government in a non-transparent way. These recommendations were made in the final TCD pilot project report, available as a PDF at http://www.terena.org/publications/.

According to an article published on Primeur Weekly Magazine, Six of the world's leading research and education (R&E) networks and two commercial partners have demonstrated for the first time a Transatlantic 100 gigabits-per-second (Gbps or one billion bits per second) transmission link for research and education between North America and Europe during the TERENA Networking Conference 2013 (TNC2013), held in Maastricht, The Netherlands. These demonstrations showcased emerging technologies and advanced applications for science, research and education.

The Trans-European Research and Education Networking Association offers a forum to collaborate, innovate and share knowledge in order to foster the development of Internet technology, infrastructure and services to be used by the research and education community.

Click here to view the TERENA Annual Report 2012

David Foster, Chairman of the Programme Committee for the 2013 TERENA Networking Conference, writes in the Call for Papers for that conference: National Research and Education Networks are facing a period of change and evolving their business models and service offerings. With increasing emphasis on international collaborations, user communities need innovative approaches to exploit the rapid evolution of technologies that are increasingly reliant on excellent networking.

This edition of the Compendium documents that evolution in several different ways.
Technological innovation remains at the heart of what National Research and Education Networks (NRENs) are about. Due to the advent of highcapacity networks, congestion at the levels of campus, backbone and external connections seems to have been largely resolved for the time being.
In recent years, two key innovations have shaped NREN developments:
• NRENs have started to develop and deploy new Authentication and
Authorisation Infrastructures;
• The spread of ‘dark fibre’ networks has enabled novel network architectures that are both more cost-effective and better able to meet changing user demands.