LUCIA
Dr Lucia Munari is just one of those scientists on whom society relies. She specifically studies the ecology of the area from which she is born – Venice – or more specifically, the Venetian lagoon. Due to climate change, the local environment is being put under increasing strain, with more frequent flooding and fluctuations in water temperature impacting both the foundations of La Serenissima and the wildlife of the Laguna.
HOW DOES LUCIA BENEFIT FROM GÉANT?
Lucia lives in Mestre, the main town outside of Venice, walking distance from the environmental campus of Università Ca' Foscari. After waking up she immediately makes her way to work. In her office, she connects quickly to the network using eduroam then uses her institutional accreditation to log in to her university portal to download all the papers she needs to mark – 27 in total!
Unfortunately, her student had lost his laptop over the weekend and was looking to purchase a new one. Lucia told him that she could use their student identity via InAcademia to purchase a new laptop online and pick up at the local store – with a 30% discount. That shouldn’t hurt the wallet as much now... Thankfully the cloud storage used by the university meant that all the student’s files and work were still available and secured by their student login.
13:00 already. She’s meeting one of her students at a local café in town Arriving early, she realises she didn’t upload the final marked papers into the student portal and pulls out her laptop. “No offence, but I do not trust the internet here!”. After finding the WiFi password, she connects to the network and enables eduVPN to connect securely to the campus systems. “Done! Uploaded!”
Back to campus and for more serious work. Lucia has to go down to the laboratory to find the results of a silt analysis. It sounds a little bland, but silt is important. The composition of the silt – taken from different areas of the lagoon – indicates what layers of sand and clay are being eroded and at what speed. This data tells her research team much about the health of the environment. Lucia sends the raw results to her research partners in Murcia, Spain, who are studying similar dynamics in the Mar Menor. Luckily for Lucia, her colleagues at Universidad de Murcia have allotted compute time at the EuroHPC centre in Barcelona, MARENOSTRUM 5 to help process the data. Even though the data is huge, Lucia utilises first the national research and education network, GARR, and then the GÉANT network, to get her results to Murcia as quickly and securely as possible.
After work, Lucia has to take the train to attend her friend’s PhD celebratory dinner in the city proper. Isabella has been using cloud based AI algorithms that study ticket sales and traffic for the Vaporetto in Venice to figure out which parts of Venice receive less water traffic and visitors and is proposing a scheme that aids local citizens with subsidised pricing. It’s an idea that would help local neighbourhoods remain intact.
At the restaurant, Lucia enjoys the celebration and most of the various speeches. During one of them, she secretly opens her phone and, utilising her institutional credentials, accesses her international research group working space via eduTEAMS. It turns out that the results from the HPC centre have been released, and the integrity of the silt near Torcello remains. Thankfully the city is safe, for now.
WHAT DOES GÉANT OFFER?
The research GÉANT enables touches almost every aspect of our lives.
Not only that, but its networking technology is shaping the internet of tomorrow.
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