Objectives/Purpose

• To create a facility and environment that supports the timely transfer of data needed to support emerging distributed computation, data manipulation, visualisation, remote instrument/experiment control and other scholastic applications and services, by pooling the network infrastructure that the participants agree to make available for this purpose.
• The WHREN has a focus on providing production, experimental and pre-production services as a consortium in the Western Hemisphere.

Participation

Participation in WHREN is open to any owner/custodian of research and education network infrastructure (circuits, lightpaths, exchange points, etc) in the Western Hemisphere that is willing and able to make that infrastructure available to other WHREN participants on an agreed basis when it is not required for its own needs.

Interconnect/Access Agreements

Each participating resource owner/custodian will prepare an interconnect/access agreement that sets out the conditions and constraints associated with making its infrastructure available to other participants. Any participant that wishes to use this infrastructure must execute this agreement (or otherwise acknowledge and agree to the conditions and constraints) with the resource owner/custodian.

Infrastructure Register

A register will be maintained of the WHREN resources available to participants and the conditions and constraints under which this infrastructure can be made available. The conditions and constraints will need to be taken into account when scheduling the use of resources.

Governance

WHREN participants pool their excess resources for the collective good of their communities. There is a desire for the evolving governance structure to be “lightweight” and consistent with this cooperative spirit.