The Global Ring Network for Advanced Application Development (GLORIAD) is certainly not a closed club, but is rather heading toward becoming an open, intercontinental connected research network. Such a fact was confirmed once again in a series of interviews with keynote speakers who participated in the Grand Opening for Big GLORIAD held last month in Seoul. First of all, Mr. Greg Cole who served as Principal Investigator of the NSF program establishing GLORIAD, as well as the program s predecessor, NaukaNet with a total budget of $9.5 mil. (from 1998- 2009), expressed great expectations on the progress of this international research network, saying that GLORIAD aims to better integrate, with its advanced network infrastructure, the research and education communities of the United States, Russia and China - and with partners in Korea, the Netherlands, Canada, as well as broader Europe, Asia, and the Americas. He outlined how, with its current mix of circuits running at 155-, 622-, 2500- and 10000-Mbps capacity around the northern hemisphere, GLORIAD received in late Dec. 2004 a five-year U.S. funding commitment from the National Science Foundation (as part of an international package of funding with its partners in Russia, China and Korea and with additional contributions from CANARIE (Canada) and SURFnet (the Netherlands) to develop a hybrid (circuit-/packetswitched) network, aiming at multiple 10 Gbps wavelengths around the globe by 2008. Mr. Cole added that the project was naturally interesting not only from a geo-political perspective of the organizing countries undertaking the joint construction and shared management of such a network crossing their territories (and the oceans and continents between and linking their scientists, educators and students) - but also significant for the advances in network services it provides. In particular, he said the U.S. expectations of GLORIAD are high, explaining that the broad range of scientific pursuits supported include the most advanced areas of collaborative research involving the partnering countries in high energy, nuclear and fusion energy physics, atmospheric science, astronomical observations, geological sciences, environmental monitoring, bioinformatics, nuclear materials protection and a host of others. Russian leadership of this GLORIAD program is provided by the Russian Research Center, the Kurchatov Institute and the Russian Academy of Science. Dr. Evgeny Pavlovich Velikhov, president of the Kurchatov Institute Science Center who delivered a keynote speech, entitled "Global Grand Challenges and GLORIAD , said that the global ring topology of the network will also provide both increased reliability and flexibility for new applications. He expressed optimism over the Grand Opening for Big GLORIAD, pointing out that it would provide the first terrestrial advanced network directly connecting Europe and Asia - across the territory of Russia. From the Asian perspective, Prof. Kilnam Chon, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, indicated in a separate interview that the current international research network infrastructure for Asia was limited, with several multi-Gbps links to North America and one multi-Gbps link between Japan and Korea. In this regard, Chon expected that GLORIAD would enhance the network infrastructure with multi-Gbps links between Asia and Europe as well as within Asia. In particular, the professor added that GLORIAD would make a major breakthrough regarding direct multi-Gbps links between Asia and Europe (through Russia). With this major enhancement to the global research network infrastructure, we will have a tremendous opportunity to improve high performance applications in science, engineering and humanity, concluded Chon.