News for and about the Internet2 community

[Greg Wood <>]

CALIFORNIA RESEARCH AND EDUCATION NETWORK ESTABLISHES FIRST
10 GIGABIT CONNECTION TO INTERNET2 BACKBONE NETWORK

CalREN is first to match nationwide Internet2 Abilene network capacity
upgrade

Los Alamitos, California--June 25, 2003--Internet2 and the Corporation
for Education Network Initiatives in California (CENIC) today announced
that CalREN, California's high-performance research and education
network, has established the first 10 gigabit per second connection to
the Internet2 Abilene backbone network. In addition to providing greater
bandwidth, this new connection will allow millions of researchers,
faculty, and students at thousands of institutions connected to CalREN
to take advantage of advanced networking capabilities such as line-speed
native IPv6 and scalable multicasting. The connection was first
established to support the Internet2 Member Meeting held in Los Angeles
during October 2002.

CalREN is a high-speed, advanced services network that connects
California research and education institutions at unprecedented speeds
of over 1000 times faster than the commodity Internet. The CalREN
Optical Network Infrastructure (ONI) is multi-tiered and supplies the
high-level network services needed to successfully conduct
high-performance research activities. It also provides network
researchers in California with the infrastructure needed to conduct
critical investigations into optical networking technology.

High-performance networking supports the development of revolutionary
network uses in fields such as astronomy, high energy physics,
tele-medicine and distance education. CalREN is a project of CENIC,
which was founded in 1997 by California's major research and academic
universities.

Harvey Newman, a professor of physics at Caltech, noted that "[t]his 10
Gigabit link between CalREN’s optical network infrastructure and the
Abilene network is on the critical path for data-intensive Grid systems
that are enabling a new generation of experiments and projects in
particle physics.  It is exactly this type of next generation network
capacity that will provide the foundation for future high performance
collaborative infrastructures, enabling physicists all over the world to
contribute effectively to the data analysis and the physics results."

Tom West, CENIC’s president and CEO, said that "[t]his is an essential
upgrade for both the CENIC and Internet2 research communities. In
California alone there are many of the nation’s premier research
institutions with very large-scale applications using the CalREN-HPR
infrastructure, an IP-based, 10 gigabit Ethernet wide area network. Just
to name a few, there's the San Diego Supercomputer Center, the
University of California Institutes for Science and Innovation, the
Center for Advanced Computing Research at Caltech and its Jet Propulsion
Lab, the University of Southern California and its Information Sciences
Institute, Stanford University and the Stanford Linear Accelerator
Center, as well as the national laboratories.  All of these institutions
are taking advantage of this network enhancement."

Abilene, an Internet2 backbone network, enables nationwide testing of
applications such as uncompressed high-definition television quality
video; remote control of scientific instruments such as mountaintop
telescopes and electron microscopes; collaboration using immersive
virtual reality; and grid computing. In addition to providing
scientists, teachers and students at the more than 225 Internet2 member
universities and research centers access to advanced networking
capabilities, the nationwide upgrade currently underway will enable
expanded network measurement capabilities and an enhanced capacity to
support experiments by the computer science research community.

"We're extremely pleased that the CENIC community will be the first to
take advantage of the new capabilities the Abilene upgrade provides,"
said Steve Corbató, director of Backbone Network Infrastructure for
Internet2. "We expect Abilene will continue to be a catalyst for
innovation, providing the research and education community a unique,
large-scale leading-edge network environment."

About Internet2(R)
Led by over 200 U.S. universities, working with industry and government,
Internet2 is developing and deploying advanced network applications and
technologies for research and higher education, accelerating the
creation of tomorrow's Internet. Internet2 recreates the partnerships
among academia, industry, and government that helped foster today's
Internet in its infancy. For more information about Internet2, see:
http://www.internet2.edu/

About CENIC
CENIC is a not-for-profit corporation serving the California Institute
of Technology, California State University, Stanford University,
University of California, University of Southern California, California
Community Colleges and the statewide K-12 school system.
CENIC’s mission is to facilitate and coordinate the development,
deployment and operation of a set of robust multi-tiered advanced
network services for this research and education community.
More information about CENIC can be found at www.cenic.org.

Contacts

CENIC
Julie M. Van Fleet

619-276-0090

Internet2
Michelle Pollak

(202) 331-5345




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