Government Computer News
Internet2 opens HOV lanes
Cover story: Energy’s ESnet supports collaborative research with on-demand, optical paths Internet2 opens HOV lanes
As Big Science gets bigger, demands on research networks to enable collaboration are growing exponentially. The Energy Department has seen traffic on its Energy Sciences Network (ESnet), which links researchers at its major research labs and universities, increase tenfold every 47 months since 1990.
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“To a certain extent, this is inevitable,” said William Johnston, ESnet department head at DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. “Scientific instruments follow Moore’s law,” and more sensitive and powerful instruments are producing more data.
As a smaller number of larger, more sophisticated instruments are built, collaboration communities are growing and sharing more data. ESnet had an average steady-state load of 1.5 gigabits/sec on its New York-Chicago- San Francisco link in July 2006. This summer, the granddaddy of all scientific instruments, the Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator operated by the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is expected to go online, promising a quantum leap in the amount of experimental data being shuttled among scientists worldwide.
“A bandwidth of 10 gigabits/sec site-to-site connectivity is needed now,” according to a 2006 DOE assessment of the needs of ESnet, “and 100 gigabits/sec will be needed by 2010.”
In fact, that capacity is already here. The bandwidth is being provided for ESnet through a 2006 partnership with Internet2, an advanced research and education network operated by a consortium of companies, universities and other organizations. The backbone is from Level 3 Communications, which finished the 13,500-mile optical fiber network for Internet2 in June 2007.
“To go from zero to 100 gigabits/sec in nine months is impressive,” said Randy Brogle, director of the research and education segment at Level 3. That expanded bandwidth is provided by bundling 10 gigabits/sec optical channels through 300 photonic network elements from Infinera. Using dense wavelength division multiplexing, additional 10 gigabits/sec channels can be added by installing additional cards at each end of the fiber-optic links.
Further scaling will be possible as optical interfaces increase to 40 gigabits/sec and then 100 gigabits/sec. “It can easily scale to 400 gigabits/sec,” Brogle said of the Internet2 backbone.
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