MYREN-X capable of tranforming country's higher education: Najib (Updated)

KUALA LUMPUR: The Malaysian Research and Education Network (MYREN-X) high-speed cyber infrastructure is capable of transforming the country's higher education and subsequently fulfill the national aspiration to churn out Nobel prize winners, said Datuk Seri Najib Abdul Razak.
The Prime Minister said the transformation would enable learning to be carried out anywhere and anytime in efforts to produce competitive human resources that meet the needs of the labour market.
Besides producing Nobel prize winners, the MYREN-X cyber infrastructure with a speed of 100 gigabits per second (gbps) can further drive the research sector including collaborative networking with researchers worldwide via the Frontier of Knowledge, he said when launching MYREN-X at the University of Malaya, here.
MYREN-X, an extension of MYREN which was launched on March 28 2005, is a computation and storage infrastructure to meet the needs of sustainable learning and research from higher institutions of learning in the country.
The Prime Minister said MYREN previously was insufficient to accommodate research and educational activities at levels such as the universities placed among the top 50 in the world and on par with cyber infrastructure such as the ones available in the developed nations.
Najib said MYREN-X was perceived to be capable of becoming a 'game changer' in driving research and educational excellence among researchers in institutions of higher learning in the country.
"I am confident the availability of the cyber infrastructure that is capable of achieving higher speed and larger scale data storage capability will lead to greater creativity in innovation where the knowledge content can be converted into digital format and enable new academic programmes to be offered to the world market,"he said.
Commenting further, Najib said such cyber infrastructure was necessary as developed nations such as the United States could provide links at super speeds for their universities compared to this country which had a maximum speed of merely two gigabits per second.
"This resulted in our researchers and educators to be constrained and lagging behind in various fields particularly in producing high impact studies involving large data,"he said.
In fact, he said, while Malaysia was in the midst of preparing for the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the era of the Digital Economy, a cyber infrastructure was needed where it could facilitate access, collaboration and reach to information at a much faster speed and in a more effective manner for the purpose of research and education.
He said the cyber infrastructure would be handled by a consortium made up of all the 20 public universities and named MYREN Network Sdn Bhd or MNSB led by Universiti Teknologi MARA through UiTM Holdings Sdn Bhd.
Also present at the event were Higher Education Minister Datuk Seri Idris Jusoh and Communications and Multimedia Minister Datuk Seri Salleh Said Keruak. — Bernama