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September 04, 2006
ESnet, Internet2 to Deploy Next-Generation Research Network
The
Department of Energy's (DOE) Energy Sciences Network (ESnet) and
Internet2 announced a partnership to deploy a
highly reliable, high-capacity nationwide network that will greatly
enhance the capabilities of researchers across the country who
participate in the DOE's scientific research efforts. The partnership
brings together two advanced networks which have a combined 30 years of
experience in providing network support to thousands of researchers
around the world.
The ESnet community requires a high performance and extremely
reliable production network to support research at national
laboratories and universities across the country. Called ESnet4, the
new network created through this partnership 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 in order to meet
the needs of large-scale DOE Office of Science projects such as DOE's
participation in the Large Hadron Collider, the Relativistic Heavy Ion
Collider at Brookhaven National Lab and several supercomputing centers.
The network will deliver production IP capabilities and new optical
services like point-to-point dynamic circuits which will serve as an
advanced and dependable platform for scientists and researchers
supported by ESnet.
"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. "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 Lawrence
Berkeley National Laboratory, connects more than 30 DOE laboratories
and provides networking to over 100,000 DOE laboratory scientists. It
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.
"This partnership will provide a quantum leap in providing the
network support required by our scientific research community, and is a
natural culmination of the extremely close working relationship the DOE
networking community has had with Internet2," said Scott Bradley,
network operations and voice services manager at Brookhaven National
Laboratory in New York. "While DOE laboratories have had to deal with
network throughput requirements of unprecedented scale -- Brookhaven's
wide area network requirements have increased by a factor of 64 over
the past five years -- the overwhelming majority of our data transfer
requirements have been to institutions outside of DOE. This partnership
with Internet2 will greatly enhance our operational networking
capabilities between labs such as Brookhaven, and the multitude of
non-DOE academic and scientific research institutions we collaborate
with."
Today, Internet2's network connects more than 5 million users at 270
research and education institutions in the United States and also provides
access to more than 80 international research networks. This partnership
will allow university and lab researchers participating in ESnet
activities to leverage their institutions' Internet2 network connection
to access the ESnet4 infrastructure and its global network partners
around the world.
The new ESnet4 infrastructure will be provided by Internet2 through
its recently announced agreement with Level 3 Communications to develop
and deploy a new advanced nationwide hybrid network infrastructure with
enhanced IP services as well as new dynamic optical capabilities that
will serve the broad Internet2 member community. Through the agreement
with Internet2, 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
Digital Optical Networking equipment across its infrastructure to
enable Internet2 users to provision optical circuits dynamically. 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.
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