Director of CESNET Association Jan Gruntorád elected to the 5-member administration body of the European GN2 Project

The director of the CESNET Association, Ing. Jan Gruntorád, CSc., was elected to the 5-member executive committee of the GN2 Project, which is a continuation of the GÉANT Project. The highest performance communication infrastructure, the Pan-European scientific research network, was operated in the framework of GÉANT. The goal of the GN2 project, realized in accordance with the 6th framework programme of the European Union, is to establish a new generation Pan-European scientific research network. This should enable European researchers to quickly transfer large volumes of data, to take advantage of advanced network applications, for example computing grids, end-to-end services, and also common project cooperation in real time.

The mission of the 5-member executive committee is the operational management of the entire project. Twenty-six national research and education networks (so-called NRENs) from all over Europe are involved in this project. One of these is CESNET. The appointment of Jan Gruntorád to the executive committee is confirmation of the respect that CESNET has in the European networking community. "With their active participation in recent international programs experts from CESNET have gained an excellent reputation and today belong to the family of top experts who determine the further development of computer networks. Our researchers were invited to solve a number of demanding tasks involved in the GN2 Project. Thanks to my appointment we shall now cooperate in the management of the entire project. I consider this to be another significant recent success for CESNET," says the director of the CESNET Association Jan Gruntorád.

The five-member executive committee was elected on December 3, 2004, at the meeting of the NREN Policy Committee. The following representatives of national networks for science and research were elected to the executive committee along with Jan Gruntorád: Boudewijn Nederkoorn (The Netherlands), Ivan Mariè (Croatia), Klaus Ullmann (Germany) and Dany Vandromme (France).

The CESNET Association was established by universities and the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic for the purpose of operating a national network for research and development. It is currently financed by the Council of Research and Development and its members. The Association operates the national optic gigabyte network CESNET2 and cooperates with Canada, the Netherlands, and the USA to build the global lambda network GLIF (Global Lambda Integrated Facility), whose Czech component is called CzechLight. Thanks to its research activities in the field of telecommunications and internet technologies the CESNET Association is the Czech representative and an active participant in the European Project GÉANT.