[News]
3/19/2008
New Research Connection to Pakistan
The US National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Pakistan Higher Education Commission (HEC) are jointly funding a high performance research and education network connection to support US-Pakistan science and technology collaborations. This project will connect the existing Pakistan Research and Education Network (PERN) and the developing PERN2 network to the global research and education network infrastructure. This connection will be implemented by a joint purchase of capacity on an undersea cable system connecting PERN/PERN2 in Karachi to an international network connection point in Singapore.

This is not a technology initiative. The technology for making this connection is well understood. The purpose of this network connection is to support US-Pakistan science and technology collaborations such as those being developed by the US-Pakistan Joint Science and Technology Working Groups. The success of these WGs is critical to the success of this network connection project. The network connections being facilitated by this project will greatly assist the scientific collaborations being defined between the US and Pakistan by allowing more direct, high-speed access and communication among S/T investigators and worldwide S/T resources. Two of many examples follow. High-speed access to the Indiana University based Bio-Mirror and other genomics based archive data which is critical for genome research will be facilitated by this high-performance connection. Similarly, this connection will allow more rapid access to data originating from the NSF funded Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES) project to assist the efforts of the Earth Sciences and Seismology WG.