The mission of APAN-TW is to provide an e-infrastructure and promote international e-Science collaboration for our research and academic community. Related activities include the coordination of international network operations, advanced network and application research and promotion of global e-Science collaboration.
Starting from 1991, Academia Sinica pioneered the first international research network across the region, and has continued leading the major international Internet link upgrade of the Research and Education (R&E) networks. We built the Taipei GigaPoP dark-fiber infrastructure and our second-generation Research/Education international backbone from T1 to T3 in 1997, which enabled us to become an important player in International Academia Networking. In 1998, we built the first and only R&E optical fiber network in Taipei City. The regions first 10G Research Network to Europe was established under the leadership of Academia Sinica in 2007. Currently, Academia Sinica has 2x10G direct connection to USA and Europe as well as 10 G to Hong Kong. The 100G island-wide backbone has been establish in 2016 as well. Up to now, disk-to-disk in-bound traffic between ASGC and Europe has reached to 16Gbps which is the highest record in history.
Since 2004, Academia Sinica has been responsible for the APGI (Asia Pacific Gird Initiative) in a serial of e-infrastructure projects under the support of European Commission. We assisted 30 sites in Asia Pacific region to join the global e-Science collaboration. Since the domain of e-Science collaboration in Asia such as earthquake, tsunami, typhoon, flood and pandemic are regional issues and cannot be dealt with by individual countries alone, therefore, it takes experts of the region from different scientific disciplines, simulation, networking, grids and clouds to mitigate the disasters of the region together. Working with scientists of various disciplines, we successfully lead e-Science applications in Asia from High Energy Physics, Biomedicine, Bioinformatics, Earth Sciences, Climate Change, Digital Archives to Social Sciences.
Collaborating with other APAN partners such as APAN-PH, APAN-TW established the Disaster Mitigation Working Group in 2016. The goal of this working group is to facilitate international collaborations to improve the disaster mitigation capability by e-Science among Asia Pacific region. It aims to encourage the knowledge sharing via various case studies, to provide Application and Data Services and to engage user communities in Asia Pacific countries.