Taking a researcher’s e-Infrastructure to the next level

TrackTrack 3 (Auditorium 3)
DescriptionTo create awareness about the advantages that lightpaths can offer, SURFnet organizes various activities for both researchers and local ICT departments. One of these activities is the contest Enlighten Your Research (EYR). This competition gives researchers of all disciplines the opportunity to explore the benefits of the network for their research.
 
In the past years, three of these competitions have been delivered. In the first competition, researchers were asked to submit a proposal for the application of one or more fixed lightpaths, whereas EYR2 aimed at promoting the use of dynamic lightpaths. One of the conclusions from these editions was that a researcher’s primary concern is not just connectivity, but rather integrated services including compute and storage facilities. Therefore, we decided to join forces with our national e-Infrastructure partners SARA and BiG Grid, and with The Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research as our scientific partner. Hence, in the third edition of EYR, we searched for cross-institutional research collaborations that would benefit from combined use of central storage and compute facilities, grid infrastructure and high-end connectivity via lightpaths.
 
One of the goals of the presentation is to share our experience with this approach and the best practices that resulted from the competition. Up to now we have supported more than 15 research groups requesting one or more (dynamic) lightpaths. From these use cases, we have learned which factors are important to the success of a lightpath project. We will present these lessons learned. Finally, we will call for international collaboration towards the scientific community, and open the discussion about ways to join forces.

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