[Introduction]

Sehr geehrter Herr Staatssekretaer Dudenhausen,

sehr geehrter Herr Prof. Jessen,

sehr geehrte Damen und Herren,

zunaechst moechte ich bemerken, dass ich mich durch die Einladung zum 20 jaehrigen Bestehen des DFN-Vereins sehr geehrt fuehle. Ich moechte Ihnen anlaesslich dieser Gelegenheit einige Ueberlegungen zur Rolle von Forschungsnetzen als Werkzeuge zur Verbesserung von Forschung und Lehre in Europa entwickeln.

Leider ist mein praktiziertes Deutsch – wie Sie vermutlich bereits festgestellt haben – nicht ausreichend, um diese Ausfuehrungen in Deutsch fortzusetzen. Deshalb erlaube ich mir, in Englisch (oder Franzoesisch) fortzufahren.

[Mrs the Minister, M the Presidents, Ladies and gentlemen, I must say that I am very impressed and honoured to be invited to this 20th anniversary of DFN, in order to share with you some of my views about the role of research networks to support improvement of research and education activities in Europe.

However, as you may have noticed already, my own practice of German language is far to be sufficient to continue this speech in German. Therefore I take the freedom to switch to English (or French) to remain understandable to everyone.]

[RENATER – DFN as NRENs]

My name is Dany Vandromme, and I am here as the director of RENATER, which is the French research and education network, acting in France in a very similar way as DFN does in Germany. I turn also to be the Chairman of the Board of DANTE, the not-for-profit Company in charge of the GEANT backbone, where I succeeded in 2003 to Klaus Ullmann, who has been the DANTE chairman from the company’s creation date. I am also one of the French representatives in ESFRI, the European Strategy Forum for Research Infrastructures.

The NRENs (National Research and Education Networks) are organisations, which were initiated between 10 and 20 years ago, to provide the research community, with a very high performance dedicated communication infrastructure, at a time when even the word Internet was totally unknown outside the academic community. DFN was among the first organisations in place, and I must admit, that on the French side, we celebrated only the 10^th anniversary of RENATER in 2003! All developed countries did follow this common model and have now their own NREN. However, the types of organisations are quite different among the various countries. In common to all, they are not-for-profit organisations. But some are just an emanation of their governments (usually the ministry in charge of Research or Education, or the one in charge of communications or industry). At the other edge of the range of possible options, the NREN organisations may have most of its users as stakeholders, as it is for the DFN Verein, with a broad university membership.

During the late 90’s the telecommunication market has been opened to the competition in all European countries, and a serious concern for most governments was: Can we expect the commercial offers of telecommunications operators fulfill the requirements of the academic community? Do we still need to have NRENs to provide a dedicated infrastructure for research. At a time where all actions of European Union was to open all markets, answer was difficult to predict and the risk was real to see the NREN disappearing behind commercial offers.

Answers were brought over time by the NREN sustained action to act at an unpreceeded level of technical and commercial excellence, both nationally and internationally. The overall cost efficiency of the NRENs is way beyond what could be achieved by having all user organisations buying their own Internet connectivity, while the technical quality of network services made available by the NRENs does not exist on the market. Furthermore, the primary objective of an NREN is not to provide connectivity to the commercial Internet, but to operate an interconnection infrastructure for an extended community, distributed in its whole country.

NREN objectives are also to provide their users with the most advanced technologies and capacities which are not yet available from commercial offers. Having such powerful tools at its disposal, allows the research community to invent and create new services, to support early adoption of new usages of information technologies, to pull the industrial partners in directions they would not go for pure commercial short or medium term motivations. Doing so, efficient partnerships exist between academy and industry, also for the benefit of the economies.

[GEANT and successor]

But the NREN action has not been restricted to the provision of a national service, and this is probably one of the most successful results of the European Union through the various R&D programmes which were funded since the early 90s, like ESPRIT, ACTS, and now the rolling FPs. From a spontaneous initiative of the people responsible for the NRENs, several generations of networks were deployed and operated across Europe, with growing capacity and autonomy. While the early 90s, networks were still based on X25 protocol with 64 kb/s links, managed by the telecommunications operators, the today European backbone, GEANT, is based on a core of10 Gbit/s links, covering +32 countries, and centrally managed by DANTE, which belongs to the NRENs. This network is the strongest network in the world, which has no equivalent elsewhere in terms of collective organisation, and which belongs to the very restricted club of extremely advanced academic networks in terms of performances. The key measure of the success of GEANT is that 3500+ universities or research institutions are reachable through a coherent network organisation. The size of this scientific community, which corresponds to the European Research Area is unique in the world. As comparison, the Abilene network in US is federating only around 200 sites while Russia or Japan rely on several networks to connect to all their academic components!

Another success of the NRENs, through GEANT, has been to share intercontinental connectivity. Instead of having each NREN buying its own capacity to meet US networks in New York, Amsterdam or Chicago, it was found more efficient to share the cost of the transatlantic pipes! Not only the cost efficiency but also the common visibility of the European NREN yield a fundamental change in the behaviour of US Research funding agencies, who finally accepted to pay their share in transatlantic connectivity, by providing reciprocal capacities. These interconnections count today in tens of Gbit/s!

The success of our collective organisation suggested to the European Commission that it may also be used to expand the influence of Europe for education and research in other world regions. As a consequence, the same model, based on NREN, is now deployed for the Mediterranean countries, through the EUMEDCONNECT project, for the South America countries with the ALICE project and more recently for the Asia/Pacific countries with the TEIN-2 project. At the same time, GEANT is also extending his connectivity to other individual countries like Russia, Belarus, Ukraina, South Africa, India, and many others.

Because of the continuous progress of technology, in parallel with the development of competition between capacity suppliers and the opening of the European Union (even beyond the 25 member states), the NRENs are now preparing a new generation of the pan-European network, which will go far beyond the existing one (and also beyond any possible commercial offer), by unifying the DANTE and NREN actions to provide end-users with unlimited bandwidth for end-to-end services across Europe. This project, for which the code name is still GN2, will obviously require the full compatibility of the pan-European and national infrastructures and services.

Support of research networks for e-science programmes

Research networks are not just plumbing, routers and high bandwidths. They are primarily the required support to contribute to the improvement of scientific research and education. As an ESFRI member, I may have a special sensitivity about Research Infrastructures, especially in the European context. I must report you that, among all topics discussed within the Forum, the Research networks are common to any research infrastructure, whatever the scientific discipline is. They are used:

· To interconnect telescopes, in order to turn them into a single instrument

· To collect and share very large databases for biology, astronomy, chemistry

· To support virtual organisations around a unique set of projects or activities

· To link distributed computing platforms to make them as a unique resource seen by users

· And still probably many other uses which are still to invent

Having at disposal such wonderful tools makes possible now to reconsider many science activities, either to make them more efficient than before, or eventually to look for aspects not possible previously because lack of real time communications or absence of well defined virtual – in the sense of distributed – organisations. UK, as it will be presented later by Professor Tony Hey, made a pionnering contribution for the application of Information Technologies with their well known e-Science programme. Addressing the political ambitions of the EU member states to increase their funding for research to 3% of the GDP by 2010, will require not only further investment in research, but also a better organisation in terms of efficiency and new ideas. There is no doubt that IT will play a significant role in this.

E-science initiatives are a scope to promote and develop the use of IT to make better research, to improve the existing system in terms of cost efficiency and scientific production as well, but also to support faster integration of public research into partnerships with other countries and with industry as well. Not all European countries have started yet in this direction, but Germany is showing a strong intention to be one of the key players in Europe and in the world. I wish that this example will be soon followed by all member states, to contribute in an integrated plan to built the European Research Area, where the research networks will be the skeleton of the construction.

Added to this, I see also the research network environment as a privileged domain where Germany and France should seek for a still tighter cooperation in developing a trans-national extremely broadband infrastructure and pushing for more focused joint research activities link to the development of e-Science programmes. Most of ingredients are already in place for such a joint initiative, so why don’t we go for it?

[Conclusion]

Abschliessend moechte ich noch einmal herausstellen, dass DFN immer in vorderster Reihe im Konzert der europaeischen NRENs gestanden hat – dies gilt sowohl fuer das Organisationsmodell als auch fuer den Einsatz von Technologien und Diensten. Ich wuensche DFN, dass es diese Fuehrungsrolle als ein Beispiel fuer alle anderen europaeischen NRENs halten kann.

Vielen Dank fuer Ihre Aufmerksamkeit.

[To close this speech, I will point out how far DFN has always be in advance of the other European NRENs, both for his organisational model and for the high level of technologies and services. I wish DFN to keep this leading role as an example for all the European NREN.

Thank you for your attention.]