POLISH OPTICAL INTERNET PROGRAMME FOR escience

Transcription

1 POLISH OPTICAL INTERNET PROGRAMME FOR escience Jacek Rychlewski, Maciej Stroinski, Jan Weglarz Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center, Noskowskiego 10, Poznan, Poland 1. Introduction The availability of modern telecommunication and information technologies has a direct influence on the evolution of all aspects of the information society. The needs of science and research community in Poland were the reason for establishing a dedicated programme for the development of the information infrastructure in Poland some years ago. A programme called The Development of the Information Infrastructure for the Scientific Community in Poland was prepared and realised by the State Committee for Scientific Research together with the Polish scientific community. As a result of this programme the following infrastructure has been built and is currently operating : * five HPC centres in Warsaw, Cracow, Poznan, Gdansk and Wroclaw, * 21 metropolitan area networks (MAN) based on their own fibre cables with the ATM or/and GbEthernet technology, * broadband research and education network POL-34/622 operated by Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Centre [1], * local area networks in most scientific and academic centres, * access of Polish research and education networks first to the European Network TEN- 155 and next to GEANT. Rapid and universal Internet development in technically and economically advanced countries has produced new technological and economic possibilities for the evolution of society. Therefore, the preparation of a new programme to realise the idea of the information society in Poland seemed inevitable. The aim of the programme is to create an advanced infrastructure together with tools, services and applications available to the entire scientific community and eventually to government and local administrations as well as the society in general. Services and applications are expected to appear as selected pilot realizations in order to verify the deployed technologies. This is the main objective of the programme entitled PIONIER: Polish Optical Internet Advanced Applications, Services and Technologies for the Information Society [2]. The State Committee for Scientific Research accepted the programme in

2 2. Structure of the PIONIER Programme The precept of the programme assumes the realization of the following three essential targets: 1. Developing the information infrastructure for the scientific community in Poland up to the level that will allow research to meet the challenges of modern science, technology, services and applications. 2. Developing and testing pilot services and applications for the information society, which will be considered as the framework for deployment in such domains as science, education, government and local administration, industry and serviceoriented business. 3. Joining the competition in software development towards new applications in the information society. The fundamental principle of the development of the information infrastructure for the Polish scientific community is to achieve the above-mentioned targets by building selected advanced network applications which use advanced network services. The services are then realized in the advanced structure of computer networks for computation, visualization, archiving, etc. For the realization of the PIONIER programme three paradigms have been assumed: the advanced network infrastructure will form the Intelligent Optical Network, middleware will be organised into a grid structure, and advanced applications will be available via portals (Fig. 1). KBN (1999) 2000 NSF 2001 escience elearning egovernment PIONIER Cyber Infrastructure Portals Grids Intelligent Optical Network Fig. 1 Paradigms of the PIONIER realization In order to present the possibilities of the programme, the Polish Optical Internet Testbed (Fig. 2) was built in 2000 [3]. To demonstrate the potential behind the testbed in the area of advanced services the following pilot applications have been developed (Fig. 3): * National Computing Grid (NCG), * distributed Data Archiving, * live video transmission, * distributed three-dimensional life simulation, * Gilgamesh digital library book. 2

3 Fig. 2 Polish Optical Internet Testbed Fig. 3 Polish Optical Testbed Applications 3

4 In order to realise the PIONIER programme, 22 scientific institutions operating the academic MAN and HPC centres formed a consortium. The consortium supervises the building of the optical network, and individual institutions, on their own or in groups, form teams to realise different tasks within the programme, often with the participation of commercial institutions (e.g. telecommunication operators, hardware and software vendors). Applications, services and technologies which have been developed and deployed in the scientific community, may and should be deployed in all domains of life as well. Therefore, the deployments should be financed by the interested institutions like ministries, telecommunication operators, hardware and software vendors as well as central and council administration units. 3. National Optical Network The networking infrastructure, which is planned to be built during the PIONIER programme, assumes the existence of 21 fibre-based MANs. These networks connect almost all research institutes and many others. The amount of bandwidth offered by them depends only on the available equipment. So, the essential issue is to have an economically and technically efficient solution for the interconnection of these networks. That solution is the National Optical Network, and its construction began in The final predicted network topology is depicted on Fig. 4. KOSZALIN SLUPSK GDANSK ELBLAG RUSSIA OLSZTYN SUWALKI LITHUANIA SZCZECIN BYDGOSZCZ BIELARUS TORUN BIALYSTOK GORZOW POZNAN WARSZAWA SIEDLCE GERMANY LÓDZ RADOM PULAWY WROCLAW LUBLIN OPOLE CZESTOCHOWA KIELCE KATOWICE KOMOROWICE KRAKÓW RZESZOW UKRAINE Legend BIELSKO-BIALA State at the end of 2002 Proposed for 2003 CZECH REPUBLIC Connected MAN Fig. 4 National Optical Network topology 4

5 Approximately 2500 km. of the network is being built now, and the same amount is planned to be built next year. This network does not only connect 21 MANs but also crosses a number of important towns, some of which are University locations. Due to this fact, the network is built with traditional G.652 fibres as well as G.655 fibres with non-zero shifted dispersion for the national connectivity and additional fibres for regional networks. It is financed by the State Committee for Scientific Research as a joint enterprise with telecom operators, which reduces the investment costs. According to the basic assumptions, the intelligent transport network will be based on DWDM technology, providing multiple 40Gbit/s channels and IP protocol-based services. It is assumed that this part of the PIONIER programme will be financed by the offset, available as the result of the tender for multi-purpose military aircraft. The DWDM transport network will consist of DWDM sections between largest cities, where the Optical Cross-Connects will be installed. Smaller cities will be connected with the use of Optical Add-Drop Multiplexers. A set of dedicated thematic networks will be built upon that transport infrastructure, including: broadband Internet for research (PIONIER-I), network interconnecting HPC locations (PIONIER-HPC), network for governmental administration (PIONIER-GOV) etc. These networks will create a base for the future dedicated GRIDs. An example may be the 4-layer structure for PIONIER-I network, with the following features: * the maximum of 5 hops between any two PoPs * Optical Channel Protection (1+1 or 1:1) for most important links * ring protection for other layers * virtual networks and channels for research projects Another example is PIONIER-HPC network, which will initially connect 5 HPC centres with 40Gbit/s channels for IP connectivity and dedicated channel specialised for the transmission of Fibre Channel client signals, widely used in supercomputers. This network will constitute the backplane for computing clusters and other distributed systems. 4. Grid for escience The science used by Information Society will work with no boundaries, either of place or time. The whole scientific community will have the same chance in the context of accessing the same information, possibilities of using HPC and virtual laboratories. The results of work will be accessible worldwide, as soon as the authors decide to make it publicly available. Easy association of facts and common co-operation between international and interdisciplinary teams will significantly accelerate the process of getting really new results. The deployment of the above -mentioned concepts requires special research environment. It covers computational grids, virtual laboratories with tele-immersion, as well as communication and collaborative systems. Nowadays, the computational grid is a subject of intensive research work and development of tools, covering distributed computing systems, management of large data sets and distributed visualisation. The goal is to build a heterogeneous dynamic and scalable computing environment with very high sustained computational power and grid enabled applications. The Polish scientific community is very active in R&D. Two Polish scientific institutes are leading within the 5th FP European grid projects: CROSSGRID (CYFRONET) [4], GRIDLAB (PSNC) [5]. 5

6 The CrossGrid project will develop, implement and exploit new Grid components for interactive compute and data intensive applications like simulation and visualisation for surgical procedures, flooding crisis team decision support systems, distributed data analysis in high-energy physics, or air pollution combined with weather forecasting. The elaborated methodology, generic application architecture, programming environment, and new Grid services will be validated and tested thoroughly on the CrossGrid testbed, with the emphasis on a user- friendly environment. The work will be done in close collaboration with the Grid Forum and the DataGrid project to profit from their results and experience, and to obtain full interoperability. The primary objective of this project is to further extend the Grid environment to a new category of applications of great practical importance, and into 11 new European countries. The essential novelty of this project consists in the extension of the Grid to a completely new and societal important category of applications. The GridLab project is the international research project funded by the European Commission under the Fifth Framework Programme. European and US research institutions, along with the leading computer vendors such as Sun and Compaq, have joined together to develop the Grid Application Toolkit (GAT). The GridLab software will enable researchers and developers worldwide to develop new generations of engineering and scientific applications that can harness the power of the Grid. The main objective of GridLab is to bring both new and legacy applications to the emerging Grid world. It will provide new, innovative tools, services and methodologies for efficient development of grid enabled applications. The GAT will contain independent modules for handling many different aspects of Grid programming. It will also provide core and easy -to -use functionality through a carefully constructed set of generic APIs for both simulation codes and Grid software. The focusing of grids for escience has also been taken up in the PIONIER programme. The following projects are under development or waiting for acceptance: * Polish National Cluster * grid-portal environment for the distributed SUN clusters (PROGRESS) * High Performance Computing and Visualisation with the SGI Grid for Virtual Laboratory Applications * National Distributed Storage Centre * Polish LDAP project and the Public Key Infrastructure (LDAP and the deployment of the PKI structure ), * WorkGroup Portal Project Polish National Cluster The main focus of this project is to deliver a productive grid environment currently connecting 9 sites (cities) in Poland, including service providers and end users. The Polish National Cluster (PNC) allows (thanks to the Virtual Users Account System developed in PSNC) the connection of Virtual Organizations with different and own management policies. The basic functionality delivers a static load balancing between HPC systems. For 2 years we have been working on the idea of dedicated application servers, which will define a set of computer systems dedicated for special applications, e.g. Gaussian, in the final stage. This approach gives us a possibility of further tuning and making the whole infrastructure more efficient. So far the expenses of the PNC project have been covered by each institution with no external funds. The hardware infrastructure covers mostly SMP machines (e.g. SGI, SUN), 6

7 but also PC cluster, managed by LSF and PBS queuing systems. The backbone of this cluster is basing on POL-34/622 and in the near future the PIONIER network. Grid-portal environment for distributed cluster of SUN computers (PROGRESS) The main goal of the PROGRESS project is to create a grid-portal environment enabling access to grid resources. The PROGRESS grid infrastructure consists of a distributed cluster of SUN computers linked through a gigabit optical network. PROGRESS integrates several parts of grid middleware upon this infrastructure, and therefore ensures that the complete grid-portal architecture will be developed for future deployments in different fields of grid enabled applications. The whole architecture integrates middleware which is already available (e.g. Globus, SGE) as well as tools and services designed and developed within six project workpackages. The PROGRESS project aims at designing and developing a kind of a grid services provider for users. Such part of access environment for computing services might be used in building user interface to grid in any form. PROGRESS aims at providing two examples of user interfaces: portal and migrating desktop. Basing on the same grid service provider two independent interfaces are realised providing different functions for potential grid users. The grid services and resources will be managed by the grid resource broker. The broker will be used by the grid service provider to run computing jobs in the grid. Scientific data will be stored in the data management system (DMS) applied across the grid. The main task of the DMS will be managing and enabling access to physical data stored across the grid storage infrastructure: computer file-systems, database systems and tape storage systems. There will be tools for visualisation of the results of science experiments run in the grid developed and deployed in the grid structure. They will take a form of a grid service. Security of the developed environment will be ensured by the real-time intrusion detection system. The system will be designed upon distributed schema with agents installed on the protected systems and hierarchical structure of management stations. The applied security model will ensure the grid-portal environment structure integrity and secure the hierarchy of users access and rights. PROGRESS is the Committee for Scientific Research grant realized by PSNC, CYFRONET and Lódz University of Technology. The project is co-financed by Sun Microsystems Poland. High Performance Computing and Visualisation with the SGI Grid for Virtual Laboratory Applications The project aims at the construction of the organisational and management framework for advanced computational and visualisation services for academic and industrial research institutions by designing and building a computational and visualisation cluster for the research and scientific community in Poland. The project will exploit the Computational Grid concept and will create a foundation for this model of the computational services organisation in Poland. The SGI Grid will consist of the existing and new SGI computers and will run basing on the future Polish Optical Internet. High Performance Computing (HPC) and High Performance Visualisation (HPV) services will be used to build the virtual laboratory (VL) and tele-immersion (TI) applications. The project will be carried out by a consortium consisting of three major partners: the Scientific Community - Academic Computer Centres, Industry SGI Advanced Technology Centre and the State Committee for Scientific Research. The consortium was also joined by the Institute of Meteorology and Water Management (Warsaw), interested mainly in the 7

8 visualisation and keeping its critical simulation more stable, which will be reached by deploying a concept of a backup centre done within a Poznan (PSNC) Kraków (Cyfronet) Warsaw (IMWM) triangle. National Distributed Storage Centre The project aims to create a distributed management system of data storage to be used by scientific institutes, government and local administration. The distributed storage system includes a hardware infrastructure (connected HSM systems and disk caches), management systems and software localised on the end user terminal. The communication of hardware infrastructure (HSM systems, file and application servers) will base on the Polish Optical Internet PIONIER network, especially PIONIER-HPC and PIONIER-GOV. To achieve the requested performance, the communication backbone will use dedicated links and very fast and high throughput connections. The management software currently existing on the market does not allow to reach the required functionality. It concerns mainly the distribution of data (information), a good level of physical and logical security and the possibility of load balancing between different independent and geographically aware Virtual Organizations (VOs). The R&D tasks will cover the following subjects: * Secure, reliable and efficient communication between distributed geographically aware access points * Quality of Service to be delivered * Definition of the end user (HPC centres and governmental institutions) requirements to be fulfilled by the data management system * Load balancing issues * Security information within a distributed environment * Increasing the reliability of the whole management infrastructure The final result of the R&D task will be a software management system (built on the top of the existing HSM management software) which will allow to access the storage data on a fast, secure, reliable and efficient basis. Additionally, the project will define various VOs with different security policies (higher security level for governmental and local administration) The Polish LDAP project and the Public Key Infrastructure (LDAP and the deployment of the PKI structure ), The Polish LDAP project consists of a large number of tasks, e.g.: - schema adaptation to support the majority of current and planned needs, - designing a global directory service in the Polish academic community, - LDAP gateway deployment to give a comfortable access to white pages service, - integration of LDAP with network and grid applications, - integration of the Polish LDAP directory with global, pan-european service The main work of the project is focused on the integration of LDAP with most popular network applications. The overall goal is to simplify access to network services and network devices to support users authentication and authorization, automate the process of gathering various statistics and support portals and single sign-on systems. The co-operation with work groups developing grid systems is planned and the global directory system will include the components needed to support distributed computing. Full integration of the Polish LDAP directory service with European LDAP activities is planned, especially within the TERENA work group and the NameFLOW Index Exchange service provided by Dante. Another goal of the project is to collect procedures, guides, 8

9 recipes, documents and build Web sites which will be helpful for new users: new sites joining the LDAP service and passive clients interested only in using LDAP resources. The Public Key Infrastructure environment will also be deployed in the academic community, and LDAP activities will be adapted and integrated to PKI requirements and needs. The deployment of the PKI is oriented not only into building the trusted environment to issue certificates for the academic world. The PKI will also be integrated with modern grid network applications. The WorkGroup Portal Project The WorkGroup Portal is developed and self-financed by the Academic Computer Center affiliated to Gdansk University of Technology (TASK). The project aims at creating a portal environment enabling access to a WorkGroup application. Its main task is to provide the possibility of sharing the work environment by a group of users distributed across the grid. The modules of this application will enable communication with other users belonging to the group. The base application modules will be asynchronous and synchronous work modules as well as interface enabling direct communication between group and team members. The asynchronous work module will include: group management, discussion panel, text and multimedia document library, document sharing, document flow management, calendar, work scheduler, search mechanisms, virtual voting and sending information of the group activity. The synchronous work module will provide: tools for text chat, whiteboard sharing, tele- and video-conference tools, adding media, such as TV, radio, camera, movie, to an ongoing session, distributed presentation of multimedia documents and session archiving. The communication interfaces will include: a GUI, interfaces to application modules and interfaces to telecommunication services, such as telephony, computer networks, cameras and microphones. Integration of those modules into one application will facilitate the creating of a work environment for groups and teams. One of the main conditions for the correct application functioning is to deploy it in the grid equipped with a broadband transmission network enabling simultaneous transfer of multimedia data to thousands of grid users. Other important issues are ensuring a proper level of security, access rules and workgroup session archiving. 5. Grid for elearning Education is one of the most important areas in building the information society. European programmes put emphasis on wide availability of electronic education (elearning), promoting digital skills, and learning throughout the whole lifetime as well as on setting the right conditions for high quality educational content creation. If we were to use a cliché phrase, we would say that the future of Poland begins at school and education will be the example for equal chances in democracy. The scientific and academic communities are closely involved in the realisation of the above- mentioned tasks. On the one hand, we have the recommendation of the elearning programme to connect schools to the already existing scientific networks, and on the other hand, a significant contribution of the scientific community is required to develop the methodology and pedagogical approach to education in the information society. We have to be prepared to deal with issues of equal and common access to educational resources, and also with individual and specialised education (for instance, access to virtual labs and highly specialised virtual lectures). The PIONIER programme is designed to help accomplish the aforementioned tasks. The base for this programme is the already existing scientific network infrastructure consisting of 21 9

10 academic optical metropolitan area networks, equipped with many information and service servers. It should be noted that the metropolitan networks altogether have around 1100 optical cable network connections with over 700 for scientific institutions, 200 for educational institutions and 180 for other public institutions (including museums and libraries). The scientific community developed the Polish Educational Portal [6]. The PEP is an information platform serving as a medium connecting students, their parents, school administration and communal offices with companies offering educational software and resources and other educational organisations developing Internet information services. The portal s document directory service gives access to educational resources for various topics such as class scenarios for teachers and educational materials for subjects like physics, math, chemistry or geography for students. The PEP introduces a resource directory service bringing together various resources sharing a common theme. The portal users can interact with the help of the discussion forum service. Additionally, the Interactive School Map service is used as a registration and cooperation centre for Polish schools. The Polish Educational Portal is a platform for exchanging thoughts and opinions, integrating the educational community and promoting educational initiatives. The PIONIER programme assumes the development of pilot applications in the areas of: * supporting education with the use of the Internet * distance learning Building the nationwide network infrastructure includes the development of regional networks and plans for pilot solutions in the area of access networks. The user conception of such networks requires the use of virtual networks and dedicating resources to particular grids. There is a real possibility to create a nationwide educational grid edugrid - under the PIONIER programme. The conception of the edugrid should incorporate the above tasks: * supporting education with the use of the Internet * distance learning * connecting schools and school networks to scientific networks 6. Grid for econtent The development and accessibility of digital content is one of the basic conditions for success in building information society. Some domains, education being the prime example, are doomed to stagnate without digital content of appropriate volume and quality. To realise how broad the scope of work associated with econtent is, let us point to the following domains: * culture and world heritage (libraries, museums, archives), * digital publishing (for currently prepared content), * audio-visual services like multimedia, television, radio. The content must be accessible both in the Internet and for mobile users. We will not achieve substantial gain in popularising digital content without taking revolutionary measures. Every new piece of content should be available in a digital form, resources created in the past must be digitalized and along with the new material stored in digital libraries. Although the process is costly and needs special programmes, both national and European to account for language diversity, there is no retreat from it. 10

11 The PIONIER programme addresses the digital content problems by initiating work on digital libraries. The base for the work is the already existing computer infrastructure for science with about 50 database services, information and communication servers running in metropolitan area networks with 4 TB of hard disk and 36 TB of storage space. We would like to mention two of many applications deployed on this infrastructure. The first is a set of streaming services available in many metropolitan networks. They deliver broadcasts of local radios all over the world via Internet. On the metropolitan network servers the following radios are broadcasted: Radio Zak (Lódz), Radio 88,4 FM Zlote Przeboje, Radio 93,4 Klasyka FM, Radio 103,4 POP FM (Poznan), Radio Akadera 87,7 FM (Bialystok). Also, the WARMAN network broadcasts sessions of the Parliament. Many other radios are connected to the Internet via metropolitan area networks, for example Radio Gdansk, Radio Lódz, Radio Merkury, Radio Konin, Radio Blue FM, Radio Alfa, Radio Rak. Works connected with realising the following projects are currently conducted: - Interactive TV and access to Polish National TV video archives, - Digital Library of Wielkopolska The Interactive TV project aims at providing access to Polish National TV video archives and live programmes for Internet users. It will enable efficient distribution of live and ondemand multimedia streams in the environment of the Polish Optical Network - PIONIER. The main objectives of the project focus on the design of GRID environment for multimedia content management and delivery, as well as providing low-cost virtual studio infrastructure for content production purposes. The other aspect of the project is to provide portals that will enable users to access GRID services. Users will gain access to a wide selection of TV programmes and multimedia resources presented in portals that will support content searching and presentation. Moreover, the security and rights management issues will be considered and implemented to provide a solution that will enable access control and accounting. The final phase of the project focuses on experiments and usage monitoring in order to validate the system. As a result of the project, the scalable multimedia delivery platform will be made available for public use and will provide considerable contribution to the information society. Project is coordinated by CYFRONET and co-financed by Polish National TV and The State Committee for Scientific Research. The second application we would like to mention is the Digital Library of Wielkopolska (one of Poland's regions). It has been developed and self-financed by the co-operative effort of two institutions: Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Centre and Poznan Foundation of Scientific Libraries. Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Centre designed and implemented dlibra Digital Library Framework. The framework allows to manage, store and search distributed digital content. It can also serve as a middleware service to other specialized end-user services as a content management system for grid. Poznan Foundation of Scientific Libraries delivered digitalized content to the Digital Library of Wielkopolska. Currently, the library consists of three collections: Cultural Heritage, Educational Materials and Regional Materials. New publications are continuously deployed in the library. 11

12 7. Grid for epoland From the perspective of developing the information infrastructure of the nation, the National Optical Network offers connections between all provincial capitals, many former provincial capitals, and numerous other cities. During the design stage of the optical fibres, also fibres for the regional connectivity were provided. Basing on that property, the Podlaskie and Kujawsko-Pomorskie Provinces have already developed plans of building regional networks. The other provinces are also going to work out similar plans with the participation of MAN-s and marshals in order to incorporate the plans into the EC structural help programmes for the regions of the Candidate Countries. However, the transport optical network is planned to be realised within the taking over of the offset investment resources. Let us remember that within the project basing on the most modern DWDM and IP technologies, and apart from the scientific networks (PIONIER-I, PIONIER-HPC), also dedicated networks for administration (PIONIER-GOV) and military units (PIONIER-WP) have been provided. 22 scientific institutions operating MAN-s and HCP-s have prepared a project (as offset proposals) of developing MAN optical networks in order to ensure co-operation with the PIONIER Network. The proposals claim that the administration and defence institutions, schools, hospitals and other similar institutions in these cities will be fully connected to co-operate with proper PIONIER networks. This proposal is complementary to the aforementioned in section 3. The infrastructure of PIONIER, itself or in connection with the infrastructure of telecommunication operators, constitutes a basis to realise the plans of epoland. 8. International meaning of PIONIER The PIONIER programme, which is planned to be completed in 2005, may significantly contribute to the perception of Poland in Europe, and can guarantee a high position within the IT solutions proposed by the EU. Such claim stems from the fact that the objectives of the PIONIER programme are completely convergent with those of the eeurope 2005 programme. We consider PIONIER to currently be the only Polish programme giving a chance to adapt to the main requirements of the eeurope 2005 programme. Regardless of the above strategy matter, the PIONIER programme will enable Poland to harmoniously co-operate with the pan-european research and education network GEANT. Currently we are connected to GEANT via 2,5 Gb/s channel, and by the end of Gb/s, offering equal access to the channel to the whole scientific community. That will make it possible for us to actively participate in the 6th FP. As it can be seen in Fig.4, the National optical Network offers optical fibre connections to our neighbour countries Germany and the Czech Republic. These connections in Gubin and Cieszyn have already had partners: Cottbus University and DFN Scientific Networks, and CESNET scientific networks, respectively. It is planned to realise the ideas of eregion on the basis of those connections. The vision and main focus of the eregion is to activate and allow real and closer collaboration of the European regions which are very close and geographically belonging to the same area, but cut with formally defined national borders, e.g. Euro-regions: Spreew-Nysa-Bóbr, Pro Europe Viadrina, and Pomeranian (on the German-Polish border). The idea is following the eeurope approach on a micro scale. The historical influence, different national policies and different existing infrastructures have decreased the possible co-operation of such regions. Mostly, the regions are also missing the appropriate 12

13 infrastructure. On the other hand, there is a wish to make the whole region more competitive by international standards, taking into account the economic situation (which is attractive for industry investments, especially for SMEs), tourism possibilities, information exchange and support for the regional population, co-operation between institutions of the same kind (high schools, universities, hospitals, regional governments). A major and strategic issue is also full co-operation between anti-crisis teams, with full integrated management systems as well as information exchange. The main ideas of the regional co-operation can be expressed in the following objectives: * Creating a rational base and possibility of integrated work between institutions across the border as defined by the eeurope; first of all in the scope of education, medicine, liquidation of natural disasters, information bases for the whole population, system for environmental protection * Enhancing the abilities of co-operation (in a general sense) by developing a new generation of services and applications * Promoting the region in the whole Europe (as a micro scale of eeurope concept) * Assurance of convenient network communication within and outside the region * Development of social and economic aspects of the region The eregion was released as an EOI for the coming 6th Framework Programme. The consortium was formed by R&D institutions, universities, network operators, IT vendors and local governments and led by PSNC. Within the building of the PIONIER network it is also planned to realise the optical fibre connections to our Eastern neighbours: Russia, Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine. These connections will enable the realisation of the Distributed Optical Gateway to connect broadband networks of these countries with the GEANT network. 9. Conclusion As it can be seen from this brief report, the programme of building the Polish Optical Internet PIONIER provides the information society with: - open and common basis and simultaneously the possibility to dedicate resources of non-related areas, - possibility of co-operation between numerous ministries and other institutions on all development, construction and exploitation stages, - modern solutions of technologically developed countries. Moreover, the pilot deployments of PIONIER may contribute to the preparation of commercial programmes (e.g. GIS national system, telemedicine), which will lead to stimulate enterprise in very modern knowledge-based industry. To sum up, PIONIER may be described as a national grid-oriented infrastructure, which constitutes a basis for building new generation applications for escience, elearning, econtent, egovernment and generally for epoland. 13

14 References [1] M. Nakonieczny, S. Starzak, M. Stroinski, J. Weglarz, Polish Scientific Broadband Network: POL34, Computer Networks and ISDN Systems 30 [2] J. Rychlewski, J. Weglarz, S. Starzak, M. Stroinski, M. Nakonieczny, B. Lesyng, M. Noga, M. Niezgódka, P. Sasiedzki, J. Zenkiewicz, PIONIER Polski Internet Optyczny, Zaawansowane Aplikacje, Uslugi i Technologie dla Spoleczenstwa Informacyjnego (in Polish), [3] A. Binczewski, N. Meyer, J. Nabrzyski, S. Starzak, M. Stroinski, J. Weglarz, First experiences with the Polish Optical Internet, Computer Networks 37 (2001), s [4] [5] [6] 14