The Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Energy Sciences Network, or ESnet, is gearing up to deploy four new high-speed transatlantic links with a total capacity of 340 gigabits-per-second, significantly boosting network speeds between US research sites and European facilities.
The trans-Atlantic expansion adds four separate links connecting Boston, New York and Washington DC with Amsterdam, London and Geneva (respectively), with two New York to London links. The enriched capacity of the network will facilitate science collaborations across the US and accelerate the exchange of data sets between US and European research sites.
It is expected that tens of thousands of US researchers from virtually every scientific domain will benefit from the increased network capabilities, but the heaviest users of the new links will be particle physicists conducting research at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland. CERN generates tens of petabytes of data every year, which is then processed by labs around the world.
The DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory and Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory are key LHC collaborators on the US side. The labs will have access to the upgraded network infrastructure as soon as it is passes the testing and commissioning process. The goal is to have all the links up and running by January 2015 before the LHC physics program comes back online in the spring of 2015.
“Particle physicists have been pushing the boundaries of networking technology for decades, and they will make use of our new extension almost immediately,” said ESnet Director Greg Bell. “Very soon, other data-intensive fields will benefit as well. We expect to see significant network traffic across the Atlantic from the astrophysics, materials science, genomics, and climate science communities.”
“Research networks around the world are collaborating to plan a more integrated global network architecture, and to upgrade intercontinental links as rapidly as possible,” Bell added. “We support these goals, and our Atlantic extension is designed in harmony with them.”