Real-time monitoring and seismic rooms in the cloud: with the entry of INGV among the
members, the Consortium GARR Association, which manages the Italian research and education
network, expands.
The Consortium GARR Association, which takes care of the national backbone for research
and provides ultra-broadband connectivity and services to the scientific, educational and
cultural community, is enriched with a new piece of Italian research: National Institute of
Geophysics and Volcanology (INGV) has become a new member.
The INGV therefore joins the promoters: CNR, ENEA, INFN and Crui Foundation representing
Italian universities and INAF, also recently associated.
“We are happy and honored by the participation of INGV in our Association”, says GARR
President Sauro Longhi. “It is the consolidation of a fruitful collaboration of over 20 years. By
participating directly in GARR activities, INGV will bring prestige and good practices to the
entire network and the benefit will be for the entire national research community”.
“The association with GARR consolidates a more than ten-year collaboration. With it the
whole INGV IT backbone becomes more robust and certainly resilient an any down of local
networks, events always possible considering the dense network of sensors, located even in
the most inaccessible points of our territory such as the peaks of the volcanoes”, says Carlo
Doglioni, President of INGV.
To date, there are 13 INGV offices connected with very high bandwidth capacity with the
GARR network: a digital infrastructure essential for real-time observation and monitoring of
earthquakes, volcanoes and tsunamis. Some of these Observatories, Centers and
Laboratories carry out highly specialized activities and, in some cases, are located in areas
with a strong digital divide such as the headquarters of Nicolosi (CT) on the slopes of Etna,
the Info Point of Stromboli and the Lipari Geophysical Observatory, headquarters of strategic
centers for monitoring Aeolian volcanoes.
Among the many international collaboration activities involving the two entities is the
European Multidisciplinary Seafloor and water column Observatory (EMSO) initiative. It is an
international consortium (so-called ERIC) whose Italian participation (host country) is
coordinated by INGV, which sees among its nodes the Sicilian site of Portopalo di
Capopassero (SR), already connected by optical fiber. This site will be the home to a data
center of strategic importance, which hosts a network of marine observatories for
monitoring and studying geophysical processes, oceanographic and biological that take place
in the depths of the ocean.
A recent successful collaboration experience was the one that is leading to the creation of a
cloud seismic room.
“With the creation of a private INGV Cloud distributed between the monitoring offices in
Catania, Naples and Rome, we have laid the foundations to promote the technological
convergence of the operating rooms, with the advantage of achieving an operating
economy even in the long term. With this choice we ensure operational continuity between
them, given that the Cloud infrastructure created is one of the possible solutions for the
operational continuity of monitoring services, although it is not proposed as a system for
Disaster Recovery, but as an infrastructural feature or facility to be used within a broader
plan for business continuity" says Giovanni Scarpato, Head of the Information Services
Center INGV and Person in Charge INGV to GARR.
The goal was to federate the INGV seismic rooms of Naples, Rome and Catania using the
GARR federated cloud model which among the advantages offers the guarantee of
monitoring continuity, even in the case of unavailability of one of the rooms, for example
due to an evacuation. The cloud solution gives the ability to access data and computing
power regardless of the location of the hardware or researchers. The three rooms have been
interconnected, so that the individual data centers can communicate with each other and
can be considered as a single room with no geographical distances.
The presentation of the distributed seismic room and the best practice of using cloud
resources for EMSO activities will be an integral part of today's GARR 2020 Workshop
entitled "Net Makers, the community that innovates the network".
IN DEPTH
GARR
GARR is the ultra-broadband network dedicated to the Italian research and education community. Its main objective is to provide high-performance connectivity and to develop innovative services for the daily activities of researchers, professors and students as well as for international collaboration.
GARR network is designed and managed by Consortium GARR, a non-profit association founded under the auspices of the Ministry of Education, University and Research. The founding members are CNR, ENEA, INFN, INGV and CRUI Foundation, representing all Italian universities.
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