BELLA on focus
"The new transcontinental link was launched in September and its capabilities demonstrated live by the HEP community. The operation was carried out by LIP-INCD on the Portuguese side and is now on focus in the Géant network newsletter"
In September 2021 the official launch of the new transcontinental link BELLA between the research network backbones in Europe (GÉANT) and Latin America (RedCLARA) took place at RedCLARA’s annual conference TICAL.
This was accompanied by live demonstrations on how BELLA connectivity will benefit scientific research communities in both continents. In particular, one demonstration illustrated the use of the new 100G direct link between Fortaleza in Brazil and Sines in Portugal by Particle Physics, undoubtedly one of the most demanding scientific communities in terms of network usage. HEP research centres, SPRACE (São Paulo, Brazil) and LIP (Portugal) were directly involved.
In particular, the two tier 2 data centres of the Worldwide Large Hadron Collider Computing Grid (WLCG), SPRACE and LIP-INCD, were directly connected at 100G, and data sets of the CMS experiment at CERN were transferred from disk to disk from Portugal to Brazil, and vice versa, using GridFTP, a file transfer protocol widely used by this community.