INDUSTRY

BLOOMINGTON, IN -- Indiana University today announced vastly increased capacity for TransPAC, the high-speed international Internet service connecting research and education networks in the Asia Pacific to those in the United States. This will make a vital contribution to continuing and expanding international collaboration between researchers in the United States and those in the Asia Pacific in digitally-enabled science - widely called e-science. "Science and research are becoming progressively more international and digitally-based with world-wide e-science communities evolving around disciplines that integrate computation, data, instruments and arrays of sensors. Global high-speed networks are the critical foundations on which e-science is based", said Michael McRobbie, Vice President for Information Technology and Chief Information Officer at Indiana University who is also Principal Investigator for the United States in TransPAC. "It will provide a very significant enhancement of the global digital infrastructure that underpins e-science collaboration between the United States and the Asia Pacific." TransPAC supports international collaborations in many fields of basic science, technology, engineering and medicine. Some representative applications include participation in the Grid Physics Network (GriPhyN) for distribution and analysis of experimental results in high energy physics; the Asia-Pacific Bioinformatics Network, providing genomic data, computational resources, and community support for medical and biological research (bioinformatics); and the Joint Program for Arctic Atmosphere Observation between laboratories at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and the Communications Research Laboratory in Japan (earth sciences). In astronomy and space science TransPAC supports the Japan-US collaboration in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). Images are transferred from FermiLab in the US to Japan for post-processing, analysis, archiving and redistribution within the Asia-Pacific region. "This new connection provides substantially increased network bandwidth between the Asia-Pacific region and the United States over two physically separate links to two different endpoints within the US," said Brian Voss, Indiana University Associate Vice President for Telecommunications. "It will provide diverse, resiliant, and stable connectivity that allows e-scientists working together in the United States and the Asia Pacific to focus on their work and not be hampered by a congested network connection across the Pacific." TransPAC connects research and education networks in the Asia Pacific associated with the Asia Pacific Advanced Network (APAN) to the Internet2 Abilene network, the vBNS, and other global networks. TransPAC will increase bandwidth available for researchers from 155Mbps (megabits per second) to 1.244Gbps (gigabits per second). International circuits for TransPAC are provided by Teleglobe and Kokusai Denshin Denwa, Co. Ltd. (KDDI). Operational support for TransPAC is provided in the US by Indiana University's Global Research Network Operations Center (Global NOC) and in Japan by the KDDI APAN NOC. Teleglobe will expand TransPAC network capacity through a Trans-Pacific 622Mbps (megabits per second) fiber optic connection between Teleglobe's Tokyo Point of Presence (POP) and its Seattle network facilities. Seattle is the location of a major access point for the Internet2 Abilene high-performance network, the Canadian Advanced Network for Advancement of Research in Industry and Education's (CANARIE) Ca*net3 network, the Australian Academic and Research Network (AARNet), and various federal networks, providing connectivity to more than 200 North American universities and research institutions. KDDI will expand TransPAC network capacity through a 622Mbps (megabits per second) transpacific ATM connection between the Tokyo Point of Presence (POP) and the StarLight optical networking facility that is run by the University of Illinois at Chicago. At StarLight, TransPAC will connect to the Dutch high-performance network (SURFnet) and STAR TAP, site of many international network connections. TransPAC will also have a second, redundant Abilene connection at StarLight. "The value of the TransPac network has just increased markedly, without further investment by the funding agencies," said Aubrey Bush, Division Director, National Science Foundation. "The partners are to be congratulated for making such an effective use of research funding." "We are pleased that KDDI and Teleglobe are taking this opportunity to become leaders in promoting international high-bandwidth connections which support applications development among the R&E networks, and we are confident they will play a valuable role in the success of international e-science," McRobbie said. Major funding for TransPAC comes from the US National Science Foundation and the Japan Science and Technology Corporation. Visit www.indiana.edu or www.transpac.org for further information.