USA and Russian GLORIAD Partnership Building International Geoscience Collaboration

At the 7th Annual Global Lambda Grid Workshop in Prague, GLORIAD (Global Ring Network for Advanced Application Development), an international advanced networking consortium announced GSciWave, a unique high performance network service to support advanced geophysical scientific research.

GSciWave provides the geoscience communities of USA and Russian Federation with a persistent high performance lightpath (1 Gbps - one billion bits of information per second) directly between two science centers, one in Moscow and one in Boulder, Colorado, bypassing the much slower rates of the standard Internet. This high speed service is already transferring extremely large scientific data files between two major science centers, the Geophysical Center and Space Research Institute, Russian Academy of Science (GC and IKI RAS) in Moscow and the National Geophysics Data Center (NGDC), National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Agency (NOAA) in Boulder, Colorado.

GSciWave is a cooperative project managed by two major partners of the GLORIAD consortium the USA and the Russian Federation. GLORIAD, which provides major cyberinfrastructure resources to support international science collaborations. This specialized network will be used to enhance the ability to perform leading-edge, innovative research and produce more sophisticated analyses and predictions of Earth system variability and change, and the impacts of the change on the ecosystems and human society. GLORIAD participants are part of a global initiative called the Global Lambda Integrated Facility (GLIF), which promotes the paradigm of lightpaths, or lambda networks, for data-intensive scientific research and applications.

A major goal of the international Geoscience communities is to develop a predictive Earth science system to help sustain Earth habitability, improve environmental quality, safeguard human health, and reduce the impacts of natural disasters. Using advanced cyberinfrastructure, the Geosciences will have the capability to produce comprehensive information systems for decision markers in the government, public and private sectors, that can reduce vulnerability of countries, economies, and individuals to climate changes, severe weather, space weather hazards, and can support efficient operation and effective resource management.

The new high-performance communications service based on a persistent lightpath between Boulder and Moscow. The service will support many areas of research in the area of Geosciences, allowing for large-scale data transfer, visualization, collaboration, data analysis, instrumentation and the development of new scientific tools and methods.