Research and Education Networks as an Enabler for Scientific Computing: The GARR Vision

In the last few decades, Moore’s law and the uptake of fibre-optics have changed the way science is done. Nowadays, research groups distributed worldwide are exploiting high capacity networks and unprecedented computing power to process large amounts of data which were simply beyond our possibilities only a few years ago. Problems too complex to be tackled are now approachable, and if your data centre is still not enough, high-capacity networks can be exploited to extend it at the geographical level. In this talk, the role of National and international Research and Education Networks is highlighted, also thanks to success stories from different scientific domains, from HEP to bioinformatics to culture, and a vision for the future is sketched.