introduction

The next ICFA-SCIC meeting will be held on 16-17 February 2017 at IFIC in Valencia, Spain.

International Committee for Future Accelerators (ICFA)
Standing Committee on Inter-Regional Connectivity (SCIC)
Chairperson: Professor Harvey Newman, Caltech

Mission

To monitor and review interregional connectivity, high energy physics requirements, and make recommendations for network improvements.

Wide area networks of sufficient, and rapidly increasing end-to-end capability are vital for every phase of high energy physicists' work. Our bandwidth usage, and the typical capacity of the major national backbones and intercontinental links used by our field have progressed by a factor of more than 1000 over the past decade, and the outlook is for a similar increase over the next decade, as we have entered the era of LHC physics served by Grids on a global scale.

Responding to these trends, and the emerging need to provide rapid access and distribution of Petabyte-scale datasets, physicists working with network engineers and computer scientists are learning to use networks effectively in the 10-40-100 Gigabit/range, placing them among the leading developers of global networks.

This website and related reports gives an overview of the status and outlook for the world's research networks and major international links used by the LHC community in particular, network technology advances in which this community has an increasingly important role, and the problem of the Digital Divide, which is a primary focus of ICFA's Standing Committee on Inter-regional Connectivity (SCIC).