The first SEEREN2 Summer School was highly appreciated by more than twenty students from a number of southeastern European and Black Sea region countries. The three-day training event was organised by TERENA as part of its work in the European Union SEEREN2 project. Invited participants in the event were Access Port Managers (APMs) and experts from the Network Operation Centres of national research and education networking organisations and universities in the region.

The summer school took place from 25 to 27 September 2006 in Heraklion, Greece, with lectures each morning and hands-on lab sessions in the afternoon. Juniper Networks sponsored the first day, by providing lectures on Quality of Service (QoS) and the different solutions available on QoS issues of serialisation, propagation and congestion. The course, given by Jean-Marc Uzé was completed by an afternoon lab session on implementation details of JUNOS-based platforms and GÉANT2 QoS services configuration.

Day 2 was devoted to NetIIS, a web-based networking information and monitoring system developed by the Belgrade University Computer Centre, a partner in SEEREN2, and presented by Slavko Gajin and Dušan Pajin.

According to the evaluation forms, the students found all the sessions interesting and useful, rating the programme on the final day as the best, with a presentation on perfSONAR, a framework and a series of tools developed as part of the GÉANT2 project to monitor network performance. For the first time, a workshop on perfSONAR gave participants an opportunity to use the tools hands-on. The introduction was given by Loukik Kudarimoti (DANTE) and the lab sessions were led by Luchesar Iliev (Institute for Parallel Processing at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences and IST Foundation, the NREN of Bulgaria) and Roman Lapacz (PSNC).

The arrangements for the venue and logistics for the summer school were carried out by GRNET, the SEEREN2 co-ordinating partner, with invaluable support from the University of Crete. The programme was planned by TERENA’s Deputy Chief Technical Officer, Valentino Cavalli with organisational support from Jim Buddin, TERENA's Workshop Organiser.

SEEREN2 (South-Eastern European Research & Education Network) is a European Union project aiming at building the southeast European segment of the GÉANT2 network. Initiatives like the summer school in the project are meant to help make leading-edge technologies and services available to the research and education communities in southeast Europe in an attempt to further ease the 'digital divide' that still separates most of the southeast European countries from the rest of the continent.

The morning lecture sessions were streamed live and the streaming archive will be available from the project website, as well as the slide presentations.

More information about the SEEREN2 Project can found on the project website.