Peking University, January 29, 2022: The  CERNET Authentication and Resource Sharing Infrastructure (CARSI) project was initiated by Peking University Computer Center in 2006 and acquired full membership of eduGAIN in May 2019. It is now its third largest member after the United States and United Kingdom. At present, CARSI has achieved federal identity certification with more than 70 countries around the world. To enhance CARSI’s role as a National Research and Education Network (NREN), Peking University spent four months upgrading the software and service system, helping CARSI to achieve a comprehensive upgrade in positioning, operations, and scale.

CARSI provides Federation authentication and global academic information resource sharing services for universities and research institutes that have established unified identity authentication of the campus network. As of now, CARSI hosts nearly 200 products from more than 70 service providers, including 0.3 million journals,  3.5 million ebooks, 26 million dissertations and more.

CARSI users can access the resources currently available anytime anywhere, solving the problem of limited off-campus access to electronic resources purchased by schools. A total of 4.8 million teachers and students in 502 colleges and universities have since benefited.


CARSI’s upgrade

In the early spring of 2020, affected by the epidemic, most of the teaching and scientific research activities in colleges and universities were completed online, and the demand for remote access to electronic resources by teachers and students increased sharply. In response to this situation, Peking University Computer Center launched a simplified version of the application process and shortened the time for service debugging and launch. In two months, it helped more than 300 colleges and universities to quickly access the service, and up to nearly 20 colleges and universities went online in a single day.


Accessing target resources through CARSI login has no risk of revealing personal privacy information and is highly secure. In addition, the CARSI Alliance operation management mechanism and related systems can all run in the IPv6 environment. On the whole, the IPv6 scale deployment of CARSI services is simple and easy to operate, which simplifies the technical communication between member universities and resource providers and reduces the technical threshold and operating costs.


CARSI’s future

In the future, CARSI aims to give play to its technical advantages such as convenience, security, internationalization, full support for IPv6 and flexible access control, as well as its team advantages of efficient collaboration. It will carry on in bringing together high-quality education resources to aid teaching, learning and research, and improve the infrastructure application platform for the coordinated development of various universities and digital resource service providers. CARSI will continue to contribute to the construction of university campus infrastructure services, and help the construction of university education informatization.

Written by: Lean Zhi Xuan
Edited by: Li Wanqi
Source: PKU News (Chinese), CARSI