ORIENT's Users

One of ORIENT's objectives is to identify existing Chinese-European collaborative projects and to encourage their usage of the infrastructure provided by ORIENT. It is also hoped that the existence of this infrastructure will encourage new collaborations, otherwise impractical or even impossible without a dedicated research network link.

Several significant research projects have already expressed an interest in using the ORIENT circuit.

EXPReS

The EXPRess eVLBI Service (EXPReS) radio astronomy project aims to expand the scope of e-VLBI (electronic very long baseline interferometry) throughout Europe and beyond. ORIENT will help connect the EXPReS project partner, the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory, to its European equivalents.

EUChinaGrid

The EUChinaGrid project also has a special interest in a connection between European and Chinese research networks. EUChinaGrid is a grid computing project, joining computational resources in China and Europe and facilitating data transfer and processing between the two regions.

Cosmic Ray Observation

The Astrophysical Radiation with Ground-based Observatory at YangBaJing (ARGO-YBJ) project is keen to see an operational connection to its site at YangBaJing in Tibet, China. Benedetto D’Ettorre Piazzoli, spokesman for ARGO-YBJ, expressed his support for the initiative: "Such a connection between China and Europe would be of high value, not only from the point of view of the ARGO-YBJ experiment, but more generally to provide an adequate support to the Europe-China GRID projects".