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Appendix 10. Digital Divide in Latin America

International Workshop on Digital Divide for Global e-Science

Mexico, Alberto Santoro

October 24-27 2007

I would like to dedicate this talk to David Williams, a very good friend!

The main purpose of this Workshop, from a series, is to understand and propose actions in Latin

America to upgrade networks for science and make it possible to participate in the new

experiments at LHC/CERN.

I

will

develop

this

short

note

about

my

talk

in

a

few

points

http://fismat.uia.mx/HEP/ICFADDW2007/Welcome.html starting with Introduction, Some

Information about Latin America on Network Developments, HEPGrid Brazil-UERJ and

Conclusion to follow.

Introduction:

Digital Divide is a consequence and not a cause. Digital Divide is not reduced to computing

and/or networking.  The subject is much more including than a simple discussion or

understanding based on computing experience. The whole society organization is involved.

However we are High Energy Physicists. We try to do our part focusing on the main points that

are crucial for our development. We are organized as an International organization, ICFA/SCIC

­ Standing Committee on International Connectivity ­ which has a sub-committee called Digital

Divide, to investigate the world situation on network, mainly in order to make it possible to work

together on GRID (in the near future) experiments of LHC. We believe that with this approach,

working for the solution of one well defined subject, we can contribute indirectly to other

computing areas. The methodology followed is presented in the successive reports available on

https://icfa-scic.web.cern.ch/ICFA-SCIC/, where the reader can find an important amount of

information about Digital Divide in the whole world.

Studying this subject, we can promptly figure how will be our computing scenario in the near

future experiments. This new generation of High Energy Physics experiments in the Large

Hadron Collider at CERN, imposes for this area architecture for computing, in which the

cooperation/collaboration is behind real possibilities.

This new architecture is GRID, in our domain, HEPGRID to express High Energy Physics Grid.

And to do Grid, it is absolutely necessary to have a good network. A good network means high

speed (>1 Gbps) and high quality (no package loss).

In this workshop we will pay attention particularly to the Latin America region, where we have a

poor degree of connectivity as we will show later. There are many countries in Latin America

participating in the LHC experiments. It is important even for the survival of HEP in the region

that physicists could develop their ideas in Physics and work with the data. The first condition for

this activity is to have a good network to communicate with colleagues at CERN and with the rest

of the world.

Connectivity is not the same for every country. The differences of speed for each gateway do not

allow for a homogeneous development of e-science. Then, in our view, this is one of the main

points to be worked by groups, and authorities of each country.

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