Abu Ghazaleh highlights NEAAR backbone to speed up scientific discovery

AMMAN – H.E. Dr. Talal Abu-Ghazaleh, Chairman of the Arab States Research and Education Network (ASREN), emphasized the importance of the collaboration of Networks for European, American, and African Research (NEAAR) for increasing data sharing and speeding up scientific discovery across Africa, US, and Europe.  NEAAR is a powerful cross-organizational project that provides services and bandwidth connecting researchers in the US with their counterparts in Europe and Africa.

Indiana University (IU) jointly leads the NEAAR collaboration with GÉANT, the European research and education network (REN), in a cooperative partnership with the African regional RENs: the UbuntuNet Alliance in south and east Africa, ASREN in North Africa, and WACREN in the west and central Africa.

Jennifer Schopf, Principal Investigator of NEAAR at IU, announces: “A new 100Gbps transatlantic subsea cable supplied by AquaComms has been switched on to enable extensive data sharing between continents”. She added: “It is expected that improved intercontinental networks will accelerate scientific breakthroughs in food security, environment preservation, and treatment of chronic diseases by allowing researchers to share data and results and to use research and computational resources more quickly”.

Cathrin Stöver, co-Principal Investigator of NEAAR at GÉANT, said: “This new link is the first step of a multiple-phase collaboration set to create a new exchange point in Africa and benefit from EU-funded AfricaConnect2 pan-African network extensions for enhancing regional research and education collaboration”