The Amlight consortium, responsible for managing international connections between the United States and Latin America for educational and research purposes, announced new 100 Gbps international connections were activated in Fortaleza, Ceará, and in Santiago, Chile. With these new links, researchers and students from both countries will have access to a new network structure with ten times the bandwidth, improving international academic collaboration.

These new links are part of the AmLight Express and Protect Project (AmLight Exp), which receives funds from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and has a duration of five years. The connections form a ring between Miami, Fortaleza, São Paulo, Santiago, and back to Miami, which makes the 100 Gbps capacity also available in Santiago and Fortaleza. "This ring will soon be connected to future submarine cables Ellalink (Portugal) and SACS (Angola), forming what should be called the South Atlantic Crossroads-SAX,” declared the director of P&D of the Brazilian National Research and Educational Network (RNP), Michael Stanton.

These high-performance connections will also serve the LSST (Large Synoptic Survey Telescope), a telescope currently under construction in Cerro Pachón, Chile. "The network will allow data from the LSST to arrive in seconds in our data unit at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois, where they will be processed in real time for alerts of transient events and annual releases of data containing billions of galaxies and stars," stated the LSST project manager, Jeffrey Kantor.

The vice-president of augmented research in technology at the Florida International University (FIU), Julio Ibarra, highlighted the strategic geographical position of both cities. "By adding Santiago and Fortaleza to the Light-ExP 100G ring, educational and research activities between the United States and South American countries will have a high-capacity and more resilient network infrastructure at their service,” the researcher explains.

According to the project coordinator of the Academic Network of São Paulo (ANSP), Luis Lopez, the reliability of a high bandwidth is a challenge in a country as large as Brazil. "This great project of RNP in association with Brazilian electricity companies will allow us to extend a 100G backbone from the tropical forests up North, all the way to the prairies down South. This is very important to the national and international scientific collaboration in the American continent,” said Lopez.

The AmLight consortium is a group formed by local, regional and national academic networks and universities: the Florida International University, the RNP, the ANSP, the Academic Networks of Chile (Reuna), of Florida (FLR), of the United States (Internet2), the Latin American Cooperation of Advanced Networks, which connects academic networks in Latin America, the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (Aura) and the Latin American telecommunications operator.

Picture: New AmLight-ExP map including the new spots operating at 100 Gbps.

Source: AmLight