ESnet Installs New 10-Gigabit Connections
Contact: Linda Vu, CSnews@lbl.gov
 |
May 26, 2009
From New England to Nashville, and across the Great Plains, the Department of Energy's (DOE) Energy Sciences Network (ESnet) added
a several 10-gigabit lines to their nationwide backbone in the past three months to enhance international science collaborations.
In March, a new 10-gigabit line was added to the ESnet hub in Boston, Mass., where the DOE network peers with the Northern Crossroads network, which connects research institutions across New England. This new connection gives researchers at Boston University and Harvad access to the Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL), where data collected by the ATLAS particle physics experiment in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland will be stored for U.S. researchers. Managed by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), the LHC will be world's largest particle accelerator when it officially comes online later this year.
In early May, a second 10-gigabit link was added to ESnet's Science Data Network (SDN) between the facility's Nashville Hub and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). This doubles the capacity of ORNL's connection to ESnet's backbone at Nashville to 20 gigabits. Like a direct line connecting two endpoints, the SDN is a circuit-oriented network that allows information to quickly and reliably flow from one remote host to another. Researchers can even reserve bandwidth on this network through ESnet's On-demand Secure Circuits and Advance Reservation System (OSCARS).
Most recently, a new 10-gigabit port was added to ESnet's Kansas City Hub, which is a peering point with the Great Plains Network. This new capability will support a 1-gigabit Virtual Local Area Network (VLAN) to the Deep Underground Science and Engineering Lab's Homestake facility in South Dakota. Such underground laboratories shield sensitive experiments from cosmic rays and allow astrophysicists to look for answers to fundamental questions such as why matter exists, how stars work and how matter and energy are related. The laboratory's technical design was led by a group of scientists, called the Homestake Collaboration, from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the University of California at Berkeley, and the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology. The National Science Foundation is funding the facility's technical design.
The new 10-gigbit port at the Kansas City Hub will also support a 1-gigabit VLAN to the Oklahoma Telecommunications Network, the telecommunications and information network for Oklahoma's education and government institutions. This link will give ATLAS researchers at the University of Oklahoma access to LHC and ATLAS data stored at BNL.
