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May 30, 2007
DoE Launches First Segment of Next-Generation Network
WASHINGTON, D.C., May 30 -- The U.S. Department of Energy's
(DoE) Office of Science and Internet2 announced today that the first
segment of a next-generation, nationwide network has gone live, marking
a key step in significantly upgrading networking services to thousands
of scientific researchers across the country and around the world. The
first complete national ring of DoE's Energy Sciences Network (ESnet4)
will be rolled out segment by segment from the East Coast to the West Coast and is expected to be fully operational by September.
"The launch of this first segment of ESnet4 represents a significant
step toward a state-of-the-art optical network that is a critical
component supporting the United States' scientific leadership," said
Dr. Raymond Orbach, DoE under secretary for science. "Not only does
this new architecture provide greater bandwidth and higher reliability
for DoE researchers, but it also underscores the support of DoE's
Office of Science to the entire U.S. university community."
The first segment connects the Washington, D.C., area to New York and
Chicago through a partnership between Internet2 and ESnet that was
announced in August. Once completed, ESnet4 will be the most
advanced and reliable, high-capacity nationwide network supporting
scientific research efforts of the DoE research community. By providing
reliable high bandwidth access to DoE laboratories and other major
research facilities, ESnet4 will enhance the capabilities of
researchers and scientists across the country, and their international
collaborators, to use large-scale instruments to advance the scientific
mission of the Office of Science.
This collaboration between ESnet and Internet2 brings together two
advanced networks that have a combined 30 years of experience in
providing network support to thousands of researchers around the world.
ESnet, funded by DoE's Office of Science and operated by DoE's Lawrence
Berkeley National Laboratory, connects more than 20 DoE laboratories
and provides networking to more than 50,000 DoE laboratory staff and
scientists. ESnet also is used by more than 18,000 researchers from
universities, other government agencies and private industry. ESnet
directly serves major Office of Science facilities, including particle
accelerators, supercomputing centers and massive scientific data
storage systems.
"As the first links of our new architecture enter production, the
ESnet and Internet2 staffs have been working very hard to build out the
rest of the production links-all of which is being done on an exacting
timeline," said Bill Johnston, head of the ESnet Department at Lawrence
Berkeley National Laboratory. "The close working relationships we have
developed over the years with Internet2 are now paying big dividends
for the U.S. research community and their international collaborators."
The new network will initially operate on two dedicated 10 gigabit
per second (Gbps) wavelengths on the new Internet2 nationwide network,
which is being delivered in collaboration with Level 3 Communications.
The network is designed to scale seamlessly over the next several years
to meet the complex needs of large-scale research projects like those
of the DoE Office of Science.
"Since announcing our partnership in August, we have made steady
progress toward deploying our new optical infrastructure on which
ESnet4 is being built and are pleased to put the first major segments
into production," said Doug Van Houweling, Internet2's president and
CEO. "The new ESnet4 network will allow university and lab researchers
participating in a broad range of scientific research to leverage their
institutions' existing Internet2 network connection to access the
ESnet4 infrastructure and its wide range of Office of Science
facilities."
Among the most ambitious projects to be undertaken by physicists
around the globe is a series of experiments at the new Large Hadron
Collider (LHC) at CERN, near Geneva, Switzerland, which will be the
world's largest particle accelerator. Expected to go online by the end
of 2007, the LHC experiments are collaborations involving thousands of
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
and DoE's USLHCnet (operated by Caltech), which will transport the
petabytes per year of LHC experiment data to two national data centers in the
United States -- Brookhaven National Lab in New York and Fermi National
Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois -- both of which are ESnet sites. From
these two U.S. centers, the LHC data will be sent to the
university-hosted "Tier 2" centers for further analysis.
Internet2 is a U.S. advanced networking consortium led by the
research and education community since 1996. Internet2 provides both
leading-edge network capabilities and unique partnership opportunities
that together facilitate the development, deployment and use of
revolutionary Internet technologies. Internet2 is in merger discussions
with National LambdaRail (NLR), a major initiative of U.S. research
universities and private sector technology companies to provide a
national scale infrastructure for research and network experimentation.
NLR has also collaborated with ESnet to provide circuits for portions
of ESnet's Science Data Network and such a merger would contribute
directly to ESnet's goal of strengthening the U.S. research and
education community network infrastructure.
For more information about Internet2, visit www.internet2.edu.
For more information about Esnet, visit www.es.net.
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Source: Internet2
