A new fiber optic network will link eight universities in the state of São Paulo, creating the possibility of sharing scientific data and teaching materials between them and with academic centers abroad. With an annual cost of US$ 3 million (R$ 15.6 million), the Backbone SP network should be fully interconnected by February 2023.
It is an infovia —a set of digital lines— made using optical cabling that allows for a higher transmission speed. It will start with 100 gb, but can increase according to demand.
The network will link USP (University of São Paulo), Unesp (State University of São Paulo), Unicamp (State University of Campinas), Mackenzie Presbyterian University, ITA (Technological Institute of Aeronautics) and the federal universities of São Paulo. (Unifesp), São Carlos (UFSCar) and ABC (UFABC).
According to João Eduardo Ferreira, coordinator of Rednesp (Research and Education Network at São Paulo) and superintendent of Information Technology at USP, improving connectivity is a necessity because of the volume of work produced by universities.
“Scientific data are getting more voluminous, we have more and more data generation in bioinformatics, biomedicine, genomics. We have to have the infovia to flow”, he says.
Universities currently have networks with speeds ranging from 1 gb to 10 gb, depending on the structure they have. In the case of Unicamp, for example, it will have ten times more speed, since today it has a transmission of 10 gb.
“This kind of infrastructure [100 gb] can make projects that were not viable before because of the inexistence of a high-speed transmission”, says Professor Sandro Rigo, deputy head of the Department of Computing Systems at Unicamp.
Today there are already sharing scientific data, such as the Genome Project. Brazilian researchers in the field of astronomy also participate in international collaboration projects. The goal is to drive this sharing with the new network.
“Infovia facilitates this sharing and movement of data generated in each research and scientific development hub”, says Ferreira.
Rednesp was created in 1988 by Fapesp (Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo), with the objective of providing a high-speed network specifically for the area of education and research.
The Rednesp coordinator cites the network's participation in the telescope project at the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, in Chile, as an example of sharing on the infovia.
“This telescope will send data to the whole world through Rednesp via this cooperation project with the network in Latin America. They will generate data with this telescope and, for that, there must be an infovia”, explains Ferreira.
“The analogy I make is with the production of grains in Brazil: if we had a train infoway to transport all the production and connected, we would have a much lower cost of transport.”
For Erick Melo, secretary general of the Department of Informatics at UFSCar, one of the universities linked to the network, the exchange of data will facilitate the work of the scientific community in relation to other technological tools.
“In some computer simulation applications in the area of chemistry and genetics, for example, we find it difficult to share data with other universities with a more limited bandwidth. This new link tends to enhance the use of all technologies.”
At UFABC, today the speed is 2 gb and, according to Paulo Victor, coordinator of the University's Information Technology Center, the Backbone SP network will increase it 50 times. With the new infovia, the entity hopes to install a high-performance computing center.
“The ability to collaborate greatly increases and increases our competitiveness in the search for funding.”
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