Rosette Vandenbroucke

Rosette Vandenbroucke is a computer scientist, wha has for many years been active in computing and networking for research. She is involved in e-infrastructures at regional, national and international level: she is the BEgrid coordinator, the Belgian NGI delegate to the European Grid Initiative and the Belgian delegate to the e-Infrastructure Reflection Group, working as a co-chair of this group. For the past six years, she was also involved in EGEE, the largest production computing grid in the world.

Belgian e-Infrastructures: abstract

Like most European countries, Belgium offers  “e-infrastructures for research”  services to universities, high schools, research institutes, ...

The best known, offering almost 20 years of service, is the networking infrastructure from BELNET: a powerful fiber optic based network has been rolled out and connects all major institutions. A growing number of services such as videoconferencing, antispam, ... are offered in answer to user needs and new pilot services are on the way to anticipate expected demands. BELNET is connected to the GÉANT network and has also private international communication lines ensuring excellent international connectivity for all users.

BELNET, in partnership with the major universities, offers a grid computing service, BEgrid, to researchers. BEgrid is connected to the European Grid Initiative (EGI) so that computing jobs can be spread over Europe and beyond.

High Performance Computing (HPC) is delivered by the two communities: Vlaams Supercomputer Center (VSC) in Flanders and CÉCI in Wallonia. Both have powerful  HPC clusters that are being interconnected and on which inter-university computing services will be provided.

The networking services are mostly available to all cultural heritage institutions in Belgium, while computing infrastructure has to be negotiated: cultural heritage institutions do not have automatic access to these facilities, and the organising entities have to decide on a case by case basis.

Presentation: PDF, 149 Kb