ORIENT's Objectives

ORIENT's main objective is to provide appropriate connectivity between research and education sites in Europe and their counterparts in China. Additional objectives aim to ensure the extension of the enhanced services and service support infrastructure of GÉANT2, to services over ORIENT. Dissemination activities will aim to raise awareness of the project amongst the academic community, fostering ties and creating ‘people networks’ across the two world regions.

Research and education activities rely heavily on the availability of a leading-edge network infrastructure in support of their IT requirements. In Europe, national investment by the NRENs is complemented, on a pan-European and global scale, by connectivity provided by GÉANT2, the network supported under the European Commission’s 6th Framework Programme.

As research co-operation becomes increasingly global, it is vital that global connectivity is provided to support collaboration between researchers in different world regions and that such an infrastructure is made available to the individual research users. This is increasingly true for joint Sino-European initiatives.

China is the world’s most populous nation and has recently experienced rapid growth both economically and in the research and education sector. ORIENT's coordinators are aware of research projects in the fields of radio astronomy, meteorology, sustainable development, high energy physics, cosmic ray observation and grid computing with requirements for high-speed connectivity between the research networks of China and Europe. In Europe the link will be complemented by the provision of point-to-point services as part of GÉANT2. In addition, in order to guarantee and demonstrate network performance, measurement devices are increasingly being deployed to create a monitoring infrastructure.