The GARR 2023 Annual Report is available online, the bilingual document recounts the developments of the network and the services and activities carried out during the year.

2023 was marked by the significant collective achievement of the completion of the GARR-T network: a project in which GARR invested €25 million of its own funds and completed in just two years. Thanks to this work, the research, education, and cultural community can rely on 20,000 km of fibre optic cables distributed throughout Italy with cutting-edge technology. This project will be further enhanced with resources from the PNRR and the TeRABIT and ICSC projects: TeRABIT plans to extend the fibre optic backbone to Sardinia and southern Sicily, while ICSC is dedicated to enhancing the backbone and access for the sites of the National Research Centre in HPC, Big Data, and Quantum Computing.

Research and experimentation activities, along with international collaborations, have led to extraordinary results such as the 1.6 Tbps DCI connection between CNAF in Bologna and CERN in Geneva, using multi-domain spectrum sharing that offers much faster and more scalable connections.

In addition to the infrastructural aspects, we have paid great attention to relationships with users, ensuring hyper-fast connections to leading Italian research infrastructures such as the Leonardo supercomputer or the Sos Enattos area, which is a candidate to host the Einstein Telescope.

Significant efforts have been dedicated to clinical and biomedical research institutes under the Ministry of Health (IRCCS and IZS – research hospitals and animal health&food safety institutes) to finalise their membership with GARR. This inclusion acknowledges the growing importance of these institutes in the national scientific landscape.

From an internal organisational perspective, GARR started the process of unifying its computing infrastructures in order to harmonise and improve the efficiency of service management and delivery processes.

Enjoy!

Read the report