ALICE2

 ALICE2, the successor to ALICE, started in the first quarter of 2009. It is managed by its Latin American partners and coordinated by CLARA. CLARA will have full commercial responsibility for the activity, while DANTE will provide management and technical support in the overall management of the project and more specifically in the area of connectivity procurement.

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ALICE2 will furthermore be partnered by the organisations responsible for four of the European NRENs, namely GARR (Italy), FCCN (Portugal), RedIRIS (Spain) and RENATER (France), acting on behalf of the pan-European GÉANT community.

The aim of ALICE2 is to stimulate and support collaborative research intra-Latin America and with Europe by strengthening the Latin American organisation CLARA and the enabling networking infrastructure RedCLARA, connected to Europe’s GEANT2, while fostering the creation and maintenance of research communities working in development-related (MDG) as well as FP7-related issues.

The ALICE2 project plans to start from the results of the ALICE Project and implement the recommendations of the evaluation reports in order to strengthen CLARA and RedCLARA to ensure long term sustainability of Research Networking in Latin America by:

1. Maintaining and further developing the network infrastructure of RedCLARA for the provision of a continuous, inclusive and persistent environment for electronic collaboration for research and education within Latin America and with an emphasis to supporting a higher education collaboration space between Latin America and Europe. This upgraded version of RedCLARA shall be based on dark fibre and wavelengths with Irrevocable Right-of-Use-type contracts to ensure low maintenance costs.
2. Creating user communities to ensure proper utilisation of RedCLARA in applications related to the Millennium Development Goals as well as fostering collaboration with European Researchers in FP7 priorities.
3. Developing a funding model that provides long term stability and sustainability for Latin American regional research and education networking. This model shall be based on a stronger CLARA organisation, a widely embraced cost distribution model and solid financial management.
4. Consolidating the long-term existing geographical coverage of RedCLARA, and seeking to expand coverage to the developing research and education communities of additional Latin American countries and to further contribute to the region’s digital inclusion via its research and education communities. To do this, the project will seek to involve all LA countries in the Project and generate synergies with the NRENs by creating a terrestrial network that can be locally used to connect different cities in the same country.
5. Empowering the NRENs and their user communities to become active players in the research and education networking community by providing training and tools for their technical, management and academic community.