AMMAN------ June 16, 2013------ Under the patronage of HE Dr. Talal Abu-Ghazaleh, Chairman of the Arab States Research and Education Network (ASREN), the 3rd EUMEDCONNECT3 meeting and a series of workshops on e-Infrastructure technologies were held.
Representatives of national research and education networks from Morocco, UAE, Algeria, Libya, Oman, Egypt and Bahrain as well as representatives of European institutions from UK, Italy, The Netherland, Ireland, and France have actively participated.
The pan-Arab e-Infrastructure network has grown widely during the past two years, interconnecting to global research networks and allowing Arab scientists seamless access to resources and services through federated and dedicated high-speed networks.
HE Dr. Abu-Ghazaleh said: “We are proud to see today an evolving pan - Arab e-Infrastructure serving scientists across the region with high speed connectivity and access to variety of scientific resources and services. Without the support of the European Commission and the League of Arab States, this could not have been possible”.
Professor Federico Ruggieri, Coordinator of CHAIN-REDs project, from INFN Italy, said: “We work with Europe, Latin America, Africa, China, India, and the Arab region to consolidate interoperability of their e-Infrastructures and facilitate seamless access to data repositories, scientific applications, computing facilities, and research cloud infrastructures. Today’s meeting is about harmonization of our efforts to support Arab young scientists.”
Mr. David West, Coordinator of EUMEDCONNECT3 project, from DANTE UK, said: “It has been my great pleasure to have worked for the Mediterranean region since 2004 with funds from European Commission to build high-speed dedicated networks serving more than 2 million scientists across the region. We see our efforts expanding to the Arab region, as a whole.”
It was concluded that dedicated connectivity is critical to our young scientists and researchers if Jordan and the Arab world will keep in pace with the world e-Infrastructure development, which has reached in some regions to 200 Gigabits per second dedicated connectivity for research and education. By far, the Arab world still lacks basic connectivity and barely has reached half Gigabits per second dedicated international connectivity. It is worth mentioning that the series workshops are conducted by experts from TERENA to put more emphasis and build capacity on identity federation management, to be deployed across the Arab region along with a region-wide Science Gateway deployment.
