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Five New Ultra-High-Performance Links to Enable New National and Global Collaboration

The Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California (CENIC) has established five new 100 Gigabit per second (Gb/s) links between the California Research and Education Network (CalREN) and Internet2.

Two new 100G connections in Los Angeles will support a variety of research purposes, along with a third 100G connection at Sunnyvale that will also connect to Internet2's Advanced Layer 2 Services. Along with these, two connections between CalREN and Internet2's TR-CPS national peering infrastructure will be upgraded to 20 Gb/s and can scale to 100 Gb/s.

CENIC designs, implements, and operates CalREN, a high-bandwidth, high-capacity Internet network specially designed to meet the unique requirements of California's K-20 research and education communities. CalREN consists of a 3,800-mile fiber-optic CENIC-operated backbone to which institutions in all 58 of the state's counties connect via leased circuits obtained from telecom carriers or via CENIC owned fiber-optic cable. In total, nearly 11 million Californians use CalREN every day.

"Evaluating climate change over the complex ocean/air/land domain of the California region often requires remote calculations that involve a high volume of input and output," states Dan Cayan, Scripps Institution of Oceanography climate researcher based at UC San Diego. "The development of this high-speed data connection between CENIC and Internet2 allows us to think about tackling a much higher level of regional modeling problems than we have before. More clarity on how climate change will unfold is vital to the needs of many stakeholders whose decisions affect developed and natural systems."

UC Santa Cruz cancer researcher David Haussler is Principal Investigator of the university's Cancer Genomics Hub (CGHub), a secure repository for storing, cataloging, and accessing cancer genome sequences, alignments, and mutation information. After just one year of operation, the CGHub is already generating a sustained average of 2.5 Gb/s of outbound traffic. More than 80% of this traffic uses R&E networks on its way to analysis centers around the country. With only a small fraction of the expected genome data uploaded to the site to date, it is clear there will be significant growth in this bandwidth in the future both from the increased number of genomes and from the increased interest in them. Haussler states that, "The expansion of bandwidth between our cancer genomics data and Internet2 to 100 Gb/s is of vital importance to support the growth of this important field of medical research."

"Networks all over the world are seeing enormous growth in recent traffic as new scientific instruments come online, cloud computing hits its stride, and collaborative research and education begins to assume a level of bandwidth that would have been unthinkable only a few short years ago," said Louis Fox, President and Chief Executive Officer of CENIC. "Some projections point to a saturation of existing networks in less than a decade, and not as an outlying possibility. 100G connections like these between the CENIC and Internet2 backbones are absolutely vital to ensure that the pace of global innovation continues to accelerate in California, the US, and the world as well."

"California is home to dozens of campus-based centers of innovation that lead the world in genomics, physics, climate, information technology, the arts and other areas," said H. David Lambert, President and Chief Executive Officer of Internet2. "Increasing their capacity for cutting-edge research and education that enhances innovation and unleashes new discoveries is a top priority for Internet2. This joint Internet2 and CENIC investment will benefit research and could impact many lives throughout the world for years to come. It's exciting to think about the possibilities."

CENIC and Internet2 serve some of the most advanced and innovative research institutions in the world, including universities, supercomputing centers and large-scale scientific facilities. These new ultra high bandwidth connections will enable more effective nationwide and global collaboration on pressing data-intensive scientific challenges, the solutions to which are heavily dependent on advanced networks.