HEC to establish 'National Research and Education Network'

The Higher Education Commission (HEC) on Wednesday announced to establish a high-speed communication infrastructure 'National Research and Education Network' (NREN) for universities/institutes and other academic sectors of the country.
The HEC and the US National Science Foundation (NSF) are jointly funding high performance research and education network connection to support Pakistan-US collaboration in science and technology. The network connections will assist the scientific collaborations being defined between the US and Pakistan by allowing direct, high-speed access and communication among science and technology investigators and the Worldwide resources.
It will connect the existing Pakistan Research Education Network (PERN) and help in developing PERN2 to the global research and education network infrastructure. This connection will be implemented by a joint purchase of capacity on an undersea cable system connecting PERN/PERN2 in Karachi to an international network connection point in Singapore.
The PERN2 is the next generation education and research network of Pakistan. This project is aimed at providing gigabit connectivity to all the universities/institutes of higher learning with a multi-gigabit core network across the country. It will fulfill the requirements of advance technologies and applications with proper security and management.
In this regard operation requirements for nation-wide connectivity have been finalised with the provision of establishing Gigabit Metro Network in all metropolitan cities of the country. The ongoing collaborative research between the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and COMSATS Institute of Information Technology on growth and characterisation of semiconductor and magnetic Nano crystals is an example of such high-speed access.
Similarly, this connection will also allow a rapid access to data from the NSF funded Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES) project to assist the Earth Sciences and Seismology Working Group, both in Pakistan and the US working to understand earthquake geology of Himalaya.