Black Sea Interconnection Initiative
 

Republic of Armenia is participating in the Black Sea Interconnection (BSI) project, which is being implemented under 7th Framework Programme of European Commission (FP7). The BSI project will develop a high-speed backbone network among the NRENs of the South Caucasus countries and enable connectivity to the pan-European research and education GÉANT2 network.

BSI is a 24 month project that has been started on 01.03.2008. The regional network and the connection to GÉANT2 is planned to be operational in late 2008. National Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Armenia (NAS RA) as BSI project participant from Armenia.

The project involves the development of strategies for interconnecting the existing infrastructures in the region, realization of the connections and supplying operational support for the established network. The existence of interconnections between the South Caucasus countries and connection to GÉANT2 with reasonable capacities will enable introduction of new services to the region and will be an important step towards the integration of the scientific potential in the region with Europe.

The main objectives of BSI are listed below.

Objective 1 - Building a proper regional research and education network among South Caucasus and connecting it to GÉANT2

The BSI will build a regional research and education network which will supply the infrastructure needed by the academic and scientific communities in South Caucasus and connect it to the pan-European research network, GÉANT2, as its main objective.

Objective 2 - Integration of South Caucasus scientific potential to Europe

In addition to the network connections, building and maintaining a collaboration and communication infrastructure will help to exploit the results of BSI successfully. PR campaigns and liaison activities will encourage the esearch communities in the region to involve in ICT projects with European colleagues using BSI as a platform and this will contribute bridging the digital divide among South Caucasus and Europe.

Objective 3 – Foster collaboration between homogenous scientific communities

A plethora of user communities will be addressed and potentially served by the provision of the network infrastructure. A diversity of scientific communities, which at the moment have very limited or lack any access to the European e-Infrastructure (online libraries, access to experiments results), will also benefit. Seismologists, astrophysicists high-energy physicists, to name a few, are potentially beneficiary end users.

The expected gain from many scientific research and eductional projects such as "Development of e-Societies in South Caucasus" and SEE-GRID-SCI would go one step further with the implementation of BSI project. Dissemination activities will promote widespread use of the BSI infrastructure by all members and all disciplines of the regional research and education community; liaise with other pan-European efforts with similar or adjacent objectives.