There are very important research projects, for example an international partnership on the new particle accelerator at CERN, in Geneva. This accelerator will transmit incredible amounts of data. The transmission of this data to various universities throughout the world will require 10 gigabit dedicated lines. In Canada, several universities, including the University of British Columbia, the University of Montreal, McGill University, the University of Calgary and others as well, will be receiving this data on a regular basis. Very high throughput rates will be required for the simple transmission of this research data.
The volume of this data will be such that it will not be able to be processed by a single computer or a single processing centre situated in one city in the world. The analysis of this data is spread out among several centres, and these calculation infrastructures are usually funded by the Canada Foundation for Innovation.
State-of-the-art scientific research requires this kind of network.