After an intense week of networking, training and sharing, the 2022 edition of TNC has come to an end. The international conference of research networks, the the first #Face2FaceTNC in three years, was hosted in the wonderful setting of Trieste, 15 years after the last Italian edition.

The participation was remarkable: 735 guests of 69 different nationalities, while the event was followed online with an audience of about 500 users. The conference was also rich in contents: 122 speakers talked about cybersecurity, trust & identity, next generation networking but also training programmes, cloud and scientific diplomacy.

Among the keynote speakers, we would like to mention in particular: Filippo Giorgi (ICTP), international expert in climatology and co-winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007, together with the executive committee of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). His stimulating speech on climate change and on the need to include human activities in climate predictive models has stirred the conscience and given impetus to the debate on the adoption of new technologies in defence of the climate.

Another keynote of great importance was Dr. Gihan Kamel, Principal Scientist at Synchrotron-light for Experimental Science and Applications in the Middle East (SESAME), who spoke about the role of SESAME not only as a pioneering research centre, but also of its role as a "bridge" to bring peace and a vehicle for economic growth in a geographical area tormented by decades of conflict.

The Italian contributions were numerous:

• on June 14th, in the session dedicated to Trust & Identity, Giuseppe De Marco (Digital Transformation Department) presented the Italian OIDC federation while Fabio Pedretti (University of Brescia) held a demo entitled: "Securing a network with blacklisting of malicious domain names and IPs".In the lightning talks, Claudio Pisa talked about the virtualisation of the GPU between different virtual machines.
• on June 15th our Gloria Vuagnin (GARR) chaired the "Optics: Shine A Light" session dedicated to optical technologies. In this session Paolo Bolletta (GARR) presented the "Spectrum Sharing Service project", on which GARR had been working in the last months.In the session dedicated to the research community, "Building Real Stuff for Research Communities", Michele Bava (University of Trieste) and Raffaella Dobrina (IRCCS Burlo Garofolo) talked about e-health while our Alberto Colla and Alex Barchiesi presented the GARR Cloud Federation.On the same day, Claudio Allocchio (GARR) chaired the session “Networking: From Projects to Platforms” where Mauro Campanella (GARR) gave the presentation “Diving in Data Plane Programming, silicon and oceans of data” while Damiano Verzulli (GARR) presented the GARRLab experience as well as the GÉANT Network Management-as-a-Service.
• On June 16th, during the "Real Life Network Orchestration" session, Fabio Farina (GARR) presented the case of automation in the new Terabit network, GARR-T; Claudio Allocchio chaired the "Pot Luck Networking” session, dedicated to different approaches to network management. On the same day Claudio Pisa presented the working group (BOF) "Community Cloud Operators", an open model of cloud services based on open source software available on hardware of research networks. Finally, in the section dedicated to demos, Carmine Scarpitta and Giulio Sidoretti (University of Rome Tor Vergata) presented "EveryWAN: an open source solution to deploy advanced SD-WAN services".
• Also, the GARR scholar, Idio Guarino, from the Federico II University of Naples, partecipated at the 2022 edition of the GÉANT Future Talent Program.

We cannot forget the musical performance that accompanied the opening of the conference. Composed for the occasion and as a result of a wide international collaboration, the performance saw musicians from different countries playing simultaneously together from three cities: Trieste, Vienna and Tallinn, exploiting the power of LoLa (Low Latency), the audio system. video developed by GARR and the Tartini Conservatory of Trieste and now known and used all over the world.

Thanks to LoLa and the high-speed links of the optical fibre of the research networks, three live electronics musicians from the Polish PSNC network performed in real-time from the General Auditorium of the TCC in Trieste, a cellist from the Academy of Music and Tallinn theater in Estonia and two marimba musicians from the Vienna University of Music and Performing Arts in Austria.

A fundamental support to the GARR network for the success of the organisation of the event was provided by LightNet, the digital infrastructure that connects the research institutions of the region with each other and with the national GARR network. The University of Trieste is the leader of the LightNet initiative, operational since 2006.

In addition to LightNet and the University of Trieste, TNC22 sees among the local partners who contributed to the event: Autonomous Region of Friuli Venezia Giulia, Municipality of Trieste, ICTP - "Abdus Salam" International Center for Theoretical Physics, SISSA - International School Superior of Advanced Studies, Historical Museum and Park of Miramare Castle, Trieste Trasporti, Trieste Concert Society, PromoTurismoFVG. GARR, which organised the very first edition of this conference precisely in Trieste, with the RARE conference in 1989, now passes the baton to RASH, the Albanian research network, which in 2023 will host TNCs in the city of Tirana.

Further information

• Photos of the event
• Event website