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Florida. These latter two links are provided through the WHREN-LILA project, jointly funded by

NSF's IRNC program and FAPESP, the state agency for research in São Paulo. RNP and

RedCLARA divide this latter link with ANSP (the São Paulo state network).

The link between S. Paulo and Miami is used to provide access to SC06 in Tampa for the HEP

research groups in S. Paulo (UNESP/USP) and Rio de Janeiro (UERJ). Access for the group at

UERJ is provided by RNP and for the UNESP/USP group by ANSP. The group from UERJ has

demonstrated the transmission of around 800 Mbps between Rio de Janeiro and the US.

In 2008, the WHREN/LILA link from São Paulo is expected to be used also for e-VLBI

activities, with the extension in January, 2008, of the metro network in Fortaleza to the space

radiotelescope of the Northeast (ROEN), belonging to the Brazilian Institute for Space Research

(INPE). ROEN already collaborates in VLBI activities with observatories such as Haystack at

MIT, and the new high-bandwidth connectivity should improve considerably the agility of this

collaboration.

The RedCLARA connectivity and its link between São Paulo and Madrid have also been used

experimentally for support of the EU's EELA Project (Extending e-Infrastructure to Latin

America), which supports a pilot grid integrating resources in Europe and Latin America,

including HEP users from a number of the LHC experiments, especially in Mexico and Brazil.

The EELA-2 project, successor to EELA and involving a larger number of institutions in both

Europe and Latin America, is due to start in April, 2008. RNP has been an active participant in

EELA and will continue to be in EELA-2.

Increasingly, level 2 end to end circuits (sometimes known as "lightpaths" or "point to point

connections") are being used experimentally for high-bandwidth dataflows. In October, 2007, an

experiment was carried out transmitting compressed HD video and uncompressed SD video

between Rio de Janeiro and Barcelona, using a level 2 circuit provisioned across 5 networks

(GIGA, RedCLARA ­ using a L2VPN tunnel, GÉANT, RedIRIS and i2CAT). In January, 2008,

permanent level 2 circuits began to be provisioned for HEP use between UERJ and UNESP in

Brazil and CERN. These will extend the current L2 connection from São Paulo to Atlantic Wave

to include links through the GLIF GOLEs in Chicago and Amsterdam.

Following the successful launch in 2007 of Internet2's Dynamic Circuit Network (DCN) and the

international collaboration of the DICE (Dante-Internet2-Canarie-ESNET) group to make such

technology interoperable, RNP has committed itself to demonstrate an interoperable dynamic

circuit service on its experimental GIGA network in 2008, and to migrate this to the Ipê network

in 2009. Such a facility will greatly enhance RNP's capability to manage the widespread use of

end to end circuits, which increasingly are required by the user community.

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