APPLICATIONS

The University of Wisconsin-Madison has launched a new research network that doubles its previous Internet access-up to 20,000 times faster and one million times the capacity of a typical home broadband connection. The Broadband Optical Research, Education and Sciences Network (or BOREAS-Net), forms a loop of fiber optic cable between UW-Madison, Iowa State University, the University of Iowa, and the University of Minnesota. It features two links to Internet2, at Chicago and Kansas City, Missouri. "Any outage-anywhere in the loop-is essentially unnoticed as traffic is rerouted at the speed of light to the other access point," says UW-Madison Interim CIO Ken Frazier. "This capacity and redundancy is essential, and a huge draw for research grants that rely on state-of-the-art network service." More research funding could translate into more jobs for the Wisconsin economy, Frazier adds. BOREAS' innovative use of this optical network enables its members to manage their own bandwidth and maintain a greater degree of flexibility in supporting research and education services. As program needs change or new research programs start, access can be enabled quickly and new paths, or lambdas, can be added without major cost. Other benefits include peering, or trading access at no additional cost. For example, the University of Washington is establishing a dedicated optical network to Kansas City. Once in place, UW-Madison can trade access to Chicago to the University of Washington for access to the West coast. Neither research university will need to make new financial investments, yet they will each have achieved major breakthroughs in connectivity to support their research and education programs. A local example of the versatility and affordability of this new network comes from the UW-Madison physics and computer sciences departments. The departments needed to increase dedicated bandwidth for their Large Hadron Collider research project to 10 Gigabits per second. If this bandwidth were purchased on existing commercial contracts, the annual cost would have been more than $3 million. Instead, through BOREAS-Net, there are no annual bandwidth costs. The one-time cost was about $100,000 and access was established in a matter of days. "As our universities generate and consume more and more network traffic, the BOREAS-Net project will allow us to meet these needs in a cost-effective manner," says project manager Pat Christian, from the UW-Madison. "This partnership will benefit all the members by providing this capacity and capability in ways unattainable by any one of the individual institutions." The coalition hopes other Midwestern institutions will join BOREAS-Net. " Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa and Iowa State have made the investment for the benefit of researchers at our universities," said Steve Cawley, vice president for information technology at the University of Minnesota and chair of BOREAS-Net. "But our primary goal is the advancement of research in higher education - and we think other institutions will see the value in joining us." Map and background at http://boreas.net/