A highway where
billions of data travel per second
arriving from
scientific research
centers throughout Italy and processed by calculation centers and supercomputers: this is the goal of
Terabit (Terabit Network for Research and Academic Big data in Italy ),
the super internet network of Italian research funded with
41 million euros
by the
National Recovery and Resilience Plan (Pnrr)
and coordinated by the National Institute of Nuclear Physics (Infn).
“In the next few years – said the president of Infn, Antonio Zoccoli during the presentation event of Terabit at the headquarters of L'Unione Sarda in Cagliari – there will be
an unprecedented wave of data
”.
The so-called
Big Data
, i.e. enormous amounts of data, are one of the dominated characteristics of all new technologies, whether they are large scientific experiments or information from satellites or smartphones from all over the planet, but in order to be really used it is necessary to have available networks capable of making them travel, large digital archives and computers powerful enough to analyze them, and above all extract value from them.
Scientific research, with new large experiments such as the Einstein Telescope, the innovative new generation observatory for gravitational waves that could be born in Sardinia, is driving this great digital transformation.
“The big challenge – added Zoccoli – will be being able to transmit data quickly, store and analyze them to extract value from them.
To do all this you need minds but also infrastructures”.
Thus Terabit was born, a network that will integrate
three already existing large
strategic research infrastructures (GARR-T, PRACE-Italy and HPC-BD-AI) to offer an innovative 'highway' for super-fast data by 2025.
Over 1 million million data per second (terabit) will be able to travel within the network which will be managed by Infn with the National Institute of Oceanography and Experimental Geophysics (Ogs), Consortium Garr, and Cineca to connect a large part of the Italy and eliminate, where they still exist, differences in the ability to access high-performance computing.
“With the high-performance computing and network infrastructures that we will create with the best technologies in existence today – said the scientific coordinator of Terabit, Mauro Campanella – our country will be able to play a decisive role on a global level and our researchers will be able to have access to services for extraordinarily powerful data analysis”.
High-performance computing, complex numerical simulations, artificial intelligence, machine learning, digital twins are some of the IT tools that are increasingly essential to scientific research, but they all require the creation of powerful infrastructures such as Terabit.
“Terabit – concluded Campanella – is an investment for the present but also for the future.
A network that represents the state of the art worldwide,
