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As predicted in the last Annual Report, 2023 was indeed a busy year for the GÉANT Association and its membership.
It was the year in which we completely left the pandemic behind us, and this was noticeable in the increased amount of real-life community interactions and events. It was also the year in which the EU’s Digital Decade, as well as the Global Gateway, went from a general planning phase to full implementation mode bringing with it very many challenges and opportunities for our community and for the GÉANT Association. For example, our community started engaging in various national and EU level EuroQCI activities showing again, if such proof was needed, that we are ready for the next technological evolution. A good example of GÉANT’s engagement with the Global Gateway is the new MEDUSA cable project in the Mediterranean, aiming to connect North Africa and the European Union with a high-capacity fibre optic submarine cable system specifically also supporting research and education (R&E) collaborations across the two shores of the Mediterranean.
Towards the second half of the year and stimulated by the European Commission and the work of the EOSC Association, we discussed in detail the concept of the EOSC Node. This led to a collaborative position paper written in the GÉANT Community and, later in the year, to GÉANT being named in two of the three lots for the public procurement tender for “Managed Services for the European Open Science Cloud Platform (EOSC)”. In Lot 1, GÉANT will be leading the delivery of the EOSC Authentication and Authorisation Infrastructure (AAI) as a subcontractor as part of the Open Science Agora Consortium, alongside Greek NREN GRNET, and Czech NREN CESNET. In Lot 2, won by Polish NREN PSNC, GÉANT will support the consortium by providing the underlying network and the AAI. Also supporting the consortium is NORDUnet – representing the Norwegian Agency for Shared Services in Education and Research (Sikt). Additionally, GÉANT will be working closely with the third lot, also awarded to PSNC, providing any support required for the proper AAI integration of their services. It is reassuring that GÉANT’s AAI infrastructure and knowledge remains a core strength, especially as it ensures a continued coherence for service access to our community.
In that respect, 2023 has also seen the introduction by the EC of “procurement” and “responding to tender” to the GÉANT environment which traditionally has been one in which we respond with grant applications to EC calls for proposals. Following the procurement in EOSC, GÉANT Association and the NREN community have started collaboration during 2023 to find an appropriate community response to the challenges and opportunities of the EuroHPC Hyperconnectivity tender, even though tenders may feel unsuited to our activities and seem like an inefficient use of resources. This activity will also keep us busy in 2024 and is likely to have long lasting effects.
At the November GÉANT General Assembly (GA) meeting, our members voted for four open GÉANT Board Member positions resulting from four Board Members – Paul Feldman, Ana Tavares Pinto, Federico Ruggieri, and Floor Jas each reaching the end of their term. While Floor Jas was re-elected for a term of three years, Claudio Allocchio (GARR), Ronan Byrne (HEAnet), and Cezary Mazurek (PSNC) have been newly elected for a three-year term. I would like to take the opportunity to again thank the Board members who have now retired from their office for their dedication to the organisation and the community and look forward to working with my new colleagues.
2024 will be another year of change for the GÉANT Association and its community, most prominent being the change which will be introduced when our CEO steps back at the end of this year. I am honoured to be guiding the community through this change, ensuring that our association continues to serve the interests of its members and our community, ensuring that the collaborative work and spirit endures!
As predicted in the last Annual Report, 2023 was indeed a busy year for the GÉANT Association and its membership.
I’m pleased to say 2023 proved to be a very successful year, with GÉANT achieving a lot of positive results.
Right on 1 January 2023, the GN5-1 project started. GN5-1 is the first phase in implementing the actions defined in the 72-month GN5 Framework Partnership Agreement which was established between the GÉANT Consortium and the European Commission in 2021. The project continues to be a major activity for us and the community, involving more than 600 contributors across 39 partners in 43 European countries. The GÉANT community continues to stretch far beyond the boundaries of the EU27 member states, ensuring that all of Europe’s scientists have a level playing field when it comes to services provided by the NREN community.
The GN5-IC1 project, focusing on the intercontinental reach of our network, commenced already at the end of 2022 and marked its first major achievement, with the successful implementation of a new 100Gbps link between GÉANT’s pan-European Research and Education network and Singapore. This new route, operational since May 2023, interconnects GÉANT’s backbone network in Marseille to the SingAREN Open Exchange in Singapore, where GÉANT is now planning to interconnect with its international partners in the region.
And staying with the network news: 2023 also saw the completion of the GN4-3N project funding. Thanks to the generous funding from the EC for GN4-3N, 2023 saw 69 routes added to our production service, 405 new Infinera nodes deployed, 50 legacy links decommissioned, and 34 countries connected with a total of 26,047 km of dark fibre or spectrum now lit. At the same time, we built a strong Open Line System (OLS) foundation with our commercial partner Infinera. The new OLS provides a robust, flexible, state-of-the-art, long-term infrastructure that reduces dependency on the market, increases capabilities to introduce emerging technologies and services (e.g. the new GÉANT Spectrum Service, Quantum Key Distribution, and Time and Frequency), is well placed to support big science users and HPC requirements, and bridges the digital divide by extending the network to the edges of Europe. And, not to be forgotten, 2023 saw the procurement stage for the renewal of the packet layer concluded, with the contract awarded to Nomios/Nokia.
eduroam continues to be a star in our portfolio and broke all records again with 7.5 billion national and international authentications in 2023 (20%+ growth from 2022). Moreover, 5,100+ IdPs are now using the CAT service (8% growth) and the team released the new geteduroam clients.
In cloud news, I would like to highlight that the OCRE 2024 Framework procurement started with a draft strategy for above-the-net services and eduMEET became an independent, community-financed open-source project.
These are just some of the highlights from our busy year and you will find a lot more information in this Annual Report – from strengthening our relationships with members, partners and stakeholders in the GÉANT Community Programme and at TNC23, to nurturing the growth of our community through the Emerging NREN Programme and Future Talent Programme.
Let me end on a more personal note. The war against Ukraine is still ongoing, and together with the Vietsch Foundation we continue to support URAN. Unfortunately, the year 2023 brought more violent conflicts across the world that affect human lives and NRENs, however, more positively, 2023 was also the year in which we were able to support an Afghan engineer who used to work for AfgREN in Afghanistan to leave his country and come to Cambridge to work in our Network Operations Centre.
Last but not least, as an organisation and community we will not forget our colleague Sarah Jones, who sadly passed away in December.
The new GÉANT network not only means our community is well placed to support big science users and HPC requirements, but bridges the digital divide by extending to the very edges of Europe.
The GÉANT Association is the collaboration of European NRENs (national research and education networks) delivering e-infrastructure and services to research and education. It comprises member NRENs and the GÉANT associates supported by the GÉANT organisation. The full list of Members, Associates & General Assembly representatives is available on the GÉANT website.
In January we launched the new GÉANT (GN5-1) Project which, together with its sister project GN5-IC1, are the first two projects under GN5-FPA, the 7-year strategic framework under Horizon Europe, the EU’s key funding programme for research and innovation.
The 24-month GN5-1 project is the latest phase of the long-running and highly successful GÉANT Project that, in close collaboration with the European Commission, has supported Europe’s research and education communities for over 20 years.
To mark the start of the project, all GN5-1 task leaders, work package leaders, and coordinators gathered in Dordrecht for a 1.5-day kick-off convention to onboard new leaders and set the context for the two-year project, to brainstorm on challenges, and to further strengthen working relationships across the work areas. This was bookended in December with a project symposium in Montpellier to review the first year’s progress and align plans for the second and final year of GN5-1.
In May the SUBMERSE (submarine cables for research and exploration) project started, which aims to utilise existing submarine cables already used by the research and education networking community, to monitor the Earth and its systems.
The 36-month project brings together 24 partners and will work closely with the diverse research communities who intend on using the data, to design and build the data generation service together, thereby creating a highly collaborative environment where data is generated by and for all parties.
During 2023, the project registered the first seismic activity on DAS (Distributed Acoustic Sensing) equipment installed in Maderia, demonstrating how existing fibre cables have the potential to detect movements, which may provide early warnings of undersea earthquakes and landslips that generate tsunami risks. The project anticipates further exciting developments – not just for the Earth Observation community but for geoscience and oceanographic communities as well.
In November we proudly announced the signature at the Global Gateway Forum of a €40m investment grant from the European Commission on the MEDUSA Submarine Cable Project, between the EC, the European Investment Bank, and AFR-IX Telecom. MEDUSA is the EC’s first digital Global Gateway project and aims to connect North Africa and the European Union with a high-capacity fibre optic submarine cable. The potential is for MEDUSA to be a real gamechanger, as for the first time it will offer a long-term connectivity solution for Algeria, Egypt, Morocco, and Tunisia. The investment is set to provide end-to-end connectivity at an access capacity of 200Gbps via submarine cable and direct terrestrial links to universities and research centres in the North African countries.
In December, the EC announced the results of the public procurement tender for “Managed Services for the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) Platform”, with GÉANT named in two of the three Lots: Lot 1 – Core Federation Services for the EOSC EU Node, and Lot 2 – Exchange Infrastructure Services for the EOSC EU Node.
Also in attendance at the EOSC Symposium in September, GÉANT and the NRENs published a paper detailing the community’s position on the establishment of EOSC Nodes to support research and education.
In order to support the US Energy Sciences Network (ESnet) access to CERN, GÉANT provides ESnet with a London-Amsterdam-Geneva connectivity ring on the European backbone. In 2023 the ring was upgraded from 200Gbps to 400Gbps, and an agreement was made to provide a new 400Gbps backhaul links between the Amitié cable system landings in the UK and France to ESnet’s PoPs in London and Geneva, respectively.
TNC23 took place in the fascinating city of Tirana, Albania, where host NREN RASH welcomed 715 attendees who enjoyed a packed programme, a week of conversations and collaborations, dancing in the streets, and a closing plenary with a special visit from the mayor! With a further 300+ participants from around the world joining via the online portal, TNC23 showed why each year TNC continues to be a real focus for our community.
With the ongoing success of the Future Talent Programme and the Emerging NREN Programme, both an integral part of TNC, this community is getting bigger and better every year. Also an integral part of TNC is the CEO Track, where we make the most of having CEOs from around the world in one place to discuss common challenges and potential solutions. Following the success of the inaugural CEO Track at TNC22, this second session at TNC23 which focused on AI and Sustainability, saw an increase in attendees, a new half-day format timed to avoid TNC programme clashes, and a joint dinner with the General Assembly to further boost networking opportunities.
In his closing plenary speech, Erik Huizer spoke passionately about the essential ingredient that makes our community unique: trust. “It is trust that will see our community continue to thrive despite the geopolitical challenges that become more apparent every day.”
We look forward to further strengthening this trust at TNC24!
Look back on the event in fuller detail here:
In October, an in-person workshop was held at the University of Malaga, with 26 registered participants. Coordinators and Steering Committee representatives from each of the 10 TF/SIGs met together with the GÉANT Community Committee (GCC) to reflect on the current Community Programme, share lessons learned, brainstorm ideas, and plan for the next 4-year strategy, 2024-28. Interactive sessions in small groups ensured a highly engaged process and the groups will continue to meet virtually to make their contributions to the new strategy. This workshop proved valuable for all and will be organised annually.
The 2023 Community Award was presented to two winners, from five shortlisted nominees who between them received 457 votes from across the community: Sebastiano Buscaglione of GÉANT, in the category “initiators of significant new ideas or improvements which have had lasting impact on the organisation, project or community”, and Sabine Jaume in the category “impactful contributors to the GÉANT project or wider community activities over a sustained period of time”. The awards were presented by Chief Community Relations Officer Paul Rouse, co-Chair of the GÉANT Community Committee, at TNC23’s opening plenary.
“It is a great honour for me to receive this award, and I want to use this occasion to thank this community for the amazing trust and support I received throughout the years. It is an incredible privilege to be able to do the work I do as I truly believe that what we do is important. Each of us working together with all our differences toward common goals; this community is a beautiful, living example of what can be achieved with trust, collaboration, and passion. There is no better place to be!”
Sebastiano Buscaglione, Senior Network Engineer, GÉANT
GÉANT’s Learning and Development activities continued apace in 2023, with 15 live training events run for 216 attendees from 34 NRENs; and the Future Talent Programme welcomed 16 participants sponsored by 8 NRENs and 8 finalists presented their Lightning Talks at TNC23.
“The aim of the Future Talent Programme is to attract the next generation to our community. It has been great to see the students’ energy and ideas emerging during their training sessions. One FTP22 alumnus is now a GÉANT employee, which is exactly what the programme envisaged. We look forward to welcoming more FTP students into our community in future.”
Sarah Hughes, Senior Learning and Development Manager, GÉANT
Ten projects were funded in 2023 as part of the Innovation Programme. These projects represented six countries including Serbia, Italy, Norway, Sweden, UK, and Ireland, and focused on the following key areas: eHealth, Networking, Cloud, Security, Trust & Identity, and Blockchain. All projects were completed and evaluated as satisfactory and the results were showcased in a virtual event in February 2024.
The Innovation Programme for 2024 was launched on 13 December 2023 at the GN5-1 Project Symposium. An increase in the maximum grant amount to €50K per project, inclusion of a TNC component in the proposal, and an expanded promotion plan to attract more diverse applicants are the main changes for the new programme.
In December the GN4-3N Project officially ended, following a 12-month extension, bringing to a close a ground-breaking and truly collaborative project that has delivered the most significant restructuring of the GÉANT backbone network in a decade, designed to support the needs of Europe’s R&E community for the next 15+ years. It has resulted in the expansion and complete renewal of the GÉANT network, with a total of 26,047km of dark fibre and spectrum lit, 69 routes fully deployed, and 34 countries connected.
In parallel, the rollout of the new Open Line System (OLS) completed, providing a robust, flexible, state-of-the-art, long-term infrastructure that reduces dependency on the market, increases capabilities to introduce emerging technologies and services (e.g. the new GÉANT Spectrum Service, QKD and Time&Frequency distribution), is well placed to support big science users and HPC requirements, and that bridges the digital divide by extending the network to the edges of Europe.
In June the GN5-IC1 Project delivered the first phase of GÉANT’s new Intercontinental Connectivity investment programme with the successful implementation of a new 100Gbps link between GÉANT and Singapore. The new route interconnects the GÉANT network in Marseilles to the SingAREN Open Exchange in Singapore, from where GÉANT plans to interconnect with its international partners in the region.
This also marks a fundamental step towards reinforcing GÉANT’s intercontinental connectivity with the Asia-Pacific region, an area that already accounts for nearly 20% of intercontinental traffic. The new capacity contributes to the capabilities of the expanded Asia-Pacific Europe Ring (AER) – the co-operative arrangement among leading-edge Research and Education Networks in Europe and in the Asia-Pacific region, to provide mutual back-up arrangements, improve network reliability and ensure greater network resilience.
The procurement stage for the renewal of the packet layer has been concluded, with the contract awarded to Nomios/Nokia. The design for Phase 2 provider router functionality was completed and a migration strategy developed. Hardware testing in the GÉANT testbed is ongoing and hardware has been installed in a number of PoPs across the GÉANT network to facilitate integration, management and migration tests.
In any human interaction, who you are and whether you can be trusted are fundamental. In our online interactions, Trust & Identity (T&I) services have become just as important, underlying mobile work and study, and the ability to access information and services from a range of sources.
In 2023 the use of the eduroam WiFi roaming service increased by over 18% compared to 2022 and registered a total of 7.5 billion national and international authentications, and NRENs around the world continue to expand access to eduroam in non-academic environments. eduroam is being rolled out to city locations and libraries in countries from Canada to South Africa.
The European Student Identifier (ESI) is a digital identifier designed to uniquely recognise students across institutions and countries throughout their study period abroad. It is specifically tailored for study abroad programmes like Erasmus+ and means student information can be securely and efficiently shared between institutions.
For institutions that are part of eduGAIN, the ESI is released as one of the user attributes when the student authenticates (via Single Sign-On) to one of the Erasmus Without Paper services.
GÉANT has been actively involved in the development of ESI throughout 2023.
The eduGAIN interfederation service grew to 79 federations and over 9,000 entities by the end of 2023. With the aim of streamlining eduGAIN tools, a new reporting tool for federation operators was deployed as well as a tool for statistics. eduTEAMS enables members of the research and education community to create and manage virtual teams and securely access and share common resources and services using federated identities from eduGAIN and trusted Identity Providers. eduTEAMS is the GÉANT implementation of the AARC Blueprint architecture. Since 2019 eduTEAMS has evolved into a versatile platform to deliver AAI services based on the AARC Blueprint Architecture. Today, eduTEAMS is being used in the context of the European Open Science Cloud and European Research Infrastructures, National Infrastructures, NRENs, High Performance Computing and the Erasmus Student Mobility programme. The CoreAAI Platform is a transformation from an IAM solution into a comprehensive platform solution. During 2023, 21 deployments in total were implemented, including the HPC community, EOSC and student mobility. Exploratory work into advanced services is underway.
MyAcademicID makes it possible for higher education students participating in the Erasmus+ programme to authenticate and access their Online Learning Agreement (OLA) and the Erasmus+ App in a safe and secure way. This identity and access management solution – now maintained and improved via the EDSSI project - plays a fundamental role in the digitalisation of the administrative processes related to student mobility programmes.
The MyAcademicID service has been pivotal in the rollout and support of the European Student Identifier (ESI).
In 2023, MyAcademicID has become an integral element of the AAI solution to the EuroHPC platform, where it will enable federated access to EuroHPC compute services.
GÉANT Cloud Framework agreements (IaaS and IaaS+ aka OCRE), which facilitate the compliant consumption of commercial cloud services for research and education institutions across Europe, registered significant growth over the course of 2023, with a 30% increase in yearly consumption. As of December 2023, nearly 900 institutions in 27 countries were reported to be actively consuming commercial cloud services via the frameworks. Preparations were carried throughout the year for the procurement of the next framework, OCRE 2024.
A new GÉANT Cloud Strategy Forum kicked off in 2023, with the aim of improving the process of involving NRENs in joint procurement activities and of developing a holistic strategy for sourcing infrastructure-cloud services.
eduMEET, the open-source videoconferencing platform developed within the GÉANT project, initiated a spin-out process into a self-sustaining, community-financed open-source software.
GÉANT made significant strides in enhancing its security infrastructure with the successful implementation of NeMo, the DDoS detection solution, across the network, ensuring early threat identification. NeMo DDoS mitigation and Firewall on Demand (FoD) were also deployed, further bolstering network resilience.
Collaboration was a key theme in 2023. Clear RACI (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed) matrices were established with the Network Operation Centre (NOC) / Security Operation Centre (SOC) for FoD and NeMo deployment. Infoshares and updates on the Network and Information Systems Security directive (NIS2), with recommendations for NRENs took place throughout the year.
The GN5-1 WP8 (Security Work Package 8) contributed to the Cybersecurity Month initiative with the campaign Become a Cyber Hero and organised the CLAW crisis management workshop that took place at PSNC headquarters in Poznan in December. The year also saw the launch of the new graduate programme which welcomed the first candidate into the security team.
GÉANT hosted a Security Day at TNC23, providing a platform for knowledge exchange and awareness-building. Online workshops on DDoS mitigation, SOC/CyberThreat Intelligence practices, and vulnerability management were conducted at events both in London and Vienna.
The activities of GÉANT and the NRENs are supportive of many of the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) but contribute significantly to three SDGs in particular: ensuring quality education (SDG 4) through services like eduroam and eduGAIN; fostering innovation (SDG 9) by connecting researchers across Europe; and forming global partnerships for sustainable development (SDG 17) through international projects and good governance practices.
In 2023, GÉANT moved further forward in alignment, actively baselining NREN involvement with the SDGs via surveys, and identified that a number of NRENs were currently working within the remit of 10 of the SDGs, highlighting an awareness of these areas of over 80%. This is a good starting figure.
The AfricaConnect3 project communications team, in collaboration with the wider African Research and Education community, has also compiled comprehensive evidence that Research and Education Networks (RENs) show excellent promise for making significant progress toward achieving several of the SDGs.
As part of ongoing efforts into developing and empowering our staff, GÉANT invested substantial effort in a bespoke Management Learning and Development Programme, alongside the implementation of a Career Development Framework. 40 members of staff took part in the programme in 2023, helping to build a stronger and more empowered organisation. In parallel, GÉANT’s Human Resources team overhauled staff benefits, updated systems, and improved ways of working to support an improved employee experience. Overall, this has supported recruitment efforts and in 2023 GÉANT welcomed 21 new joiners as part of incremental growth and replacement hires.
GÉANT is committed to driving gender equality and, following the establishment of a Gender Equality Committee and the publishing of a Gender Equality Plan in September 2022 in accordance with European Commission guidelines, undertook a programme of activities throughout 2023 aimed at achieving the goals set out in that plan. As a result of the activities relating to recruitment, the proportion of female applications for all advertised vacancies increased by 6% (to around a third of applications) and the proportion of female employees recruited for technical roles increased by 31%.
The Gender Equality Committee will continue its activities based on the 2024 Gender Equality Action Plan.
of data carried per day
increase in network traffic
per second capacity
average availability
The CSM22 campaign was created and coordinated by communications and security experts from Belnet, GÉANT, MARnet and SURF, under the auspices of WP8.
The campaign included a programme of webinars held by security experts from industry and the wider GÉANT community and featured something new: the collaboration with RedCLARA, the Latin American space for collaboration and development in education, science and innovation giving CSM22 a truly global dimension. This collaboration included the availability of live interpretation services in three languages (English, Spanish and Portuguese).
The campaign content was varied, informative and comprehensive, including articles, interviews, opinion pieces, tips and technical papers, and targeted a different audience group each week in October: decision makers, cybersecurity professionals, home workers, students and researchers.
Here’s the campaign in numbers:
GÉANT is Europe’s leading collaboration on network and related infrastructure and services for the benefit of research and education.
