The
U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
(Berkeley Lab) today announced a major step toward creating one of the
world’s fastest scientific networks to accelerate research in fields
ranging from advanced energy solutions to particle physics. Known as the
Advanced Networking Initiative (ANI), the effort represents a $62
million multi-year investment by the DOE Office of Science in
next-generation networking technology.
“As
science becomes increasingly data-driven and global in scale, it’s
critical that we create an infrastructure that will enable our
scientists to collaborate and compete successfully in the search for
solutions to some of the world’s biggest challenges in energy,” said DOE
Office of Science Director William F. Brinkman. “The Advanced
Networking Initiative is the kind of investment that will help secure
and maintain America’s scientific pre-eminence and improve the quality
of life for all of us.”
Under
the subcontracting agreement that Berkeley Lab signed with Internet2,
the Department of Energy’s Energy Sciences Network (ESnet) staff will
work with Internet2 to develop a 100 gigabit- per-second (100 Gbps)
prototype network, increasing the information-carrying capacity of DOE’s
present scientific network by several orders of magnitude.
“Berkeley
Lab has long been a key part of the nation’s scientific leadership in
physics, chemistry, and energy research,” said Paul Alivisatos, director
of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. “Berkeley Lab has continued
this tradition through advanced computation and networking used at the
forefront of modern scientific inquiry. It’s fitting that, when it came
to building the next-generation network, the DOE turned to Berkeley Lab
and ESnet to ensure that ANI meets the needs of the U.S. research
community to work with the increasingly complex data flows associated
with tackling our nation’s most urgent challenges and leading the world
in collaborative, discovery-class research.”
The
prototype network is a crucial bridge to a planned nationwide 100 Gbps
scientific network that will support thousands of DOE scientists in
their research on environmental modeling, developing energy solutions,
and exploring the fundamental nature of the universe, as well as in
accessing data from one-of-a-kind experimental facilities such as the
Large Hadron Collider. A portion of the funding also goes to the
development of a national-scale network testbed, made available to
researchers and industry for experiments with new network technologies,
protocols and applications to help them get up to speed on the new 100
Gbps capability.
To
build the national network, Internet2 will use fiber strands on
Colorado-based telecommunications firm Level 3 Communications’ Tier 1
fiber-optic network, and will provide cutting-edge optical networking
equipment from Ciena Corporation, a Maryland-based provider of network
infrastructure solutions. By collaborating on complementary projects,
ESnet and Internet2 hope to leverage both the ANI investment and
Internet2’s own investments to maximize the value of both, to deliver
unprecedented network capabilities to an increased pool of potential
users.
The
100 Gbps prototype network, including hardware and dark fiber, will
initially connect three DOE unclassified supercomputing centers: the
National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) at Berkeley
Lab, Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF), and Argonne
Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF), as well as the Manhattan Landing
International Exchange Point (MANLAN).
“Internet2
is excited by the synergies created through this joint project, and how
it builds on an already solid relationship with Berkeley Lab to create a
flagship scientific network of unrivaled speed and capacity,” said Dave
Lambert, Internet2 president and CEO. “We believe the new ANI network
will not only play a vital role in helping our community fulfill their
research, education and service goals, but will create a host of
economic opportunities and assure the U.S. a leading role in global
science for many years to come.”
An investment in scientific competitiveness
This
kind of stimulus investment in IT infrastructure is intended to spur
U.S. scientific competitiveness by leading to accelerated development
and wider deployment of future technologies, speeding the exchange of
data and creating new ripples of scientific innovation—and the jobs that
come with it. According to Steve Cotter, ESnet Department Head, this
ANI funding is enabling Berkeley Lab and Internet2 to advance 100 Gbps
technology development, lower its cost, and speed its adoption by the
scientific community.
Networks
like ESnet are ramping up capacity as the volume of data generated by
scientific research rises exponentially. For some scientists, ANI’s 100
Gbps capabilities cannot come fast enough.
“We
now have many more people wanting to access and then replicate climate
data than in previous years,” said Dean Williams, climate scientist at
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
Long-range benefits
As
part of the agreement, the Berkeley Lab has negotiated a 20-year lease
on dark fiber capacity to be leveraged for so-called “disruptive”
research, allowing DOE, industry and university researchers to use the
facility to investigate new networking technologies and protocols, and
effectively locking in the cost of future network infrastructure needs
for the next two decades.
The
ANI network will also jump-start ESnet’s research in support of “green”
energy-efficient networking–a hot priority as data volumes and network
and supercomputing center energy demands keep rising. With Berkeley
Lab’s commitment to lead efforts in carbon reduction and energy
efficiency for research, the ANI 100 Gbps prototype will be instrumental
in providing measurements of network energy consumption on a real-time
basis. ESnet intends to monitor and archive energy usage, making this
data available to researchers so they can better understand energy
consumption as they develop the next generation of energy-smart
networking devices.