The Global Ring Network for Advanced Applications Development (GLORIAD), a global research network connecting students and researchers, has announced plans to expand its net across African continent after a stint in Egypt.
GLORIAD expects the network to enable researchers and students from across Africa participate in the global research programs including high energy physics, astronomy, remote sensing, weather and climate science – and hundreds of others.
GLORIAD said Egypt, as current chair of the African Ministerial Council on Science and Technology (AMCOST), is taking a leadership role in efforts to extend GLORIAD access and its high capacity links to other countries in Africa.
“We are actively working with our Egyptian partners to broaden the network’s reach in Africa and in the Gulf region through GLORIAD’s new GulfLight project,” said the GLORIAD’s principal investigator Greg Cole.
According to Cole, the work in Africa includes the North Africa Ring project, which aims to connect Egypt, Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, Libya at 1 Gbps capacity.
“The governments of Ethiopia, Sudan and South Sudan have issued formal requests to the Egyptian government to join the network. And we are in talks with telecommunications provider Baharicom to dramatically improve R&E infrastructure to communities across the west coast of Africa,” Cole said.
The Egyptian Ministry of Science switched on the new high-speed GLORIAD network late last year connecting scientists, educators and students across the US and Egypt.
The move, Cole says, gave Egyptian universities, researchers and students gained access to a vastly increased speed of data transfer with thousands of universities and science facilities across the U.S., Europe, Asia and the rest of the world at a high speed of over a billion bits per second (Gbps).
According to Joe Mambretti, Director of the International Center for Advanced Internet Research at Northwestern University, the science and technology communities in Egypt have made a major contribution to global cooperative research by implementing their advanced GLORIAD communications network and exchange, which already support multiple key projects.
GLORIAD, headquartered in Tennessee, US, is a high-speed network enabling scientists, students and educators to collaborate on a daily basis using advanced communications and information technology tools through Internet network dedicated to supporting research, education and medical science and separate Internet for science.
