Canada: Completion of Five Projects Providing New or Enhanced Access to Canada’s National Research and Education Network (NREN) Announced

From CANARIE:

Through these projects, six college and university campuses, with over 100,000 staff, students and faculty, will benefit from new or enhanced connections to the NREN that enable national and global links to colleagues, research instruments, services and data.
Two research hospitals were also connected to the NREN and now have greater capacity to support wide-ranging, data-rich collaborative research.

Canada’s NREN connects over 650 universities, colleges, research hospitals and government research labs to thousands of like institutions worldwide through a global web of over 100 NRENs.
Following are detailed descriptions of the projects:

• In British Columbia, BCNET extended its fibre network to connect two campuses of Douglas College and one campus of the Justice Institute of British Columbia. This high-speed connection to Canada’s NREN enables Douglas College to become a primary repository for the Open Education Resources initiative, a critical resource for students, staff and faculty. At the Justice Institute, the NREN connection enables users to fully utilize the Simulation Training and Exercise Collaboratory (SIMTEC), a web-based simulation and high definition training tool for real-life emergency scenarios. BCNET also extended the NREN to connect Surrey Memorial Hospital. This connection supports multiple research groups at the hospital, including those using the MedTech laboratory’s imaging technologies, which rely heavily on computer processing, modelling and categorization of sensor-captured brain data.

• In Alberta, Cybera expanded and upgraded its network infrastructure in the City of Edmonton, providing flexibility to meet evolving needs. This upgrade enables high-speed access to the NREN for both McEwan University and the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology. Among other initiatives, this connection supports NAIT’s Centre for Sensors and System Integration, as well as the Centre for Oil Sands Sustainability and The Boreal Research Institute, all of which will benefit from improved NREN connectivity. In a separate project, Cybera provided a new NREN connection to Concordia University of Edmonton, opening up new opportunities for staff, students and faculty to benefit from high-speed connections to hundreds of institutions in Canada and thousands globally.

• In Saskatchewan, SRNET upgraded key network infrastructure equipment to meet advanced user needs through increased security, reliability, capacity, bandwidth management, and routing capabilities. These improvements deliver improved performance to all Saskatchewan institutions connected to the NREN via SRNET.

• In Manitoba, MRnet upgraded key network links and core switches in Brandon and Winnipeg. These network upgrades increase network reliability, and the higher bandwidth opens up new opportunities for collaboration in teaching and research at higher education institutions and K-12 schools.

• In Ontario, ORION projects improved the resiliency of a critical Point of Presence (PoP) in Toronto, and extended and improved the network in two key jurisdictions: Kingston and York Region. In Kingston, the upgraded network infrastructure supports researchers leveraging the Centre for Advanced Computing at Queen’s University, including researchers using brain imaging to explore brain function. In York Region, Southlake Regional Hospital now connects to ORION’s network. This new connection supports data-intensive research and healthcare-focussed companies working at the hospital’s business accelerator, CreateIT

• In Quebec, RISQ updated its backbone fibre network to improve the performance and redundancy of the network in the key Sherbrooke-Lennoxville corridor. This upgrade improves performance for key users in the area, including Bishop’s University, Champlain College, and an Agriculture Canada research centre.

See Also:Learn More, Read the Complete Announcement
See Also: NREN Network Map

Filed under: Data Files, Management and Leadership, News, Open Access, Patrons and Users