BERKELEY, CA and ANN ARBOR, MI-The Department of Energy’s (DOE) Energy Sciences Network (ESnet; Berkeley, CA) and Internet2 (Ann Arbor, MI) are collaborating to deploy a nationwide network for national laboratory and university-based participants in DOE’s scientific research efforts. Called ESnet4, the new network will initially operate on two dedicated 10 Gigabit per second (Gbps) wavelengths on the new Internet2 nationwide infrastructure and will seamlessly scale by one wavelength per year for the next four to five years. The network will deliver production IP capabilities and new optical services like point-to-point dynamic circuits.
The infrastructure will be provided by Internet2 through its recently announced agreement with Level 3 Communications (Broomfield, CO) to develop and deploy a nationwide hybrid network infrastructure with enhanced IP services as well as dynamic optical capabilities for the broad Internet2 member community. Level 3 will provide the underlying bandwidth services over a dedicated optical platform with carrier-class reliability. Internet2 and ESnet will operate the ESNet4 optical infrastructure to provide flexibility and control in the dynamic provisioning of lightpaths and sub-channels needed to support today’s large-scale and highly complex scientific research. Level 3 will deploy Infinera’s (Sunnyvale, CA) Digital Optical Networking equipment across the Internet2 infrastructure to enable the dynamic provisioning of optical circuits.
The new Internet2 network builds upon successful tests of dynamically provisioned optical waves for ESnet conducted earlier this year by the Hybrid Optical and Packet Infrastructure (HOPI) project of the Internet2 member community. “ESnet and Internet2 share a common technical vision for the evolution of dynamically delivered network capabilities that will enable the next-generation of scientific breakthroughs,” said Bill Johnston, head of ESnet at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBL; Berkeley, CA). “In creating this partnership, ESnet and Internet2 will extend the most cutting-edge network capabilities with guaranteed carrier-class dependability, allowing our scientific community to focus its resources on its core research and educational objectives.”
ESnet, funded by DOE’s Office of Science and operated by LBL, connects more than 30 DOE laboratories and provides networking to over 100,000 DOE laboratory scientists and is also used by more than 18,000 researchers from universities, other government agencies, and private industry. ESnet directly serves major science facilities including particle accelerators, supercomputing centers, and massive scientific data storage systems.
Among the most ambitious projects to be undertaken by physicists around the globe is the new Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, which will be the world’s largest particle accelerator. Expected to go online by the end of 2007, the LHC is a collaboration by over two thousand scientists from universities and laboratories around the world investigating fundamental questions about matter and the origins of the universe.
In the United States, researchers at universities and laboratories will participate in this global research effort through the ESnet4 network, enabling the analysis and transmission of multiple-terabytes of data from the LHC in Geneva, Switzerland. For more information, contact Jon Bashor at [email protected].
-Hassaun A. Jones-Bey