News for and about the Internet2 community

["Lauren Rotman" <>]

ESnet and Internet2 Partner To Deploy Next Generation Network for Scientific
Research and Discovery

ANN ARBOR, Mich., and BERKELEY, Calif. -- August 31, 2006 -- The Department
of Energy's (DOE) Energy Sciences Network (ESnet) and Internet2 -- two of
the nation's leading networking organizations dedicated to research -- today
announced a partnership to deploy a highly reliable, high capacity
nationwide network that will greatly enhance the capabilities of researchers
across the country who participate in the DOE's scientific research efforts.
The partnership brings together two advanced networks which have a combined
30 years of experience in providing network support to thousands of
researchers around the world.

The ESnet community requires a high performance and extremely reliable
production network to support research at national laboratories and
universities across the country. Called ESnet4, the new network created
through this partnership will initially operate on two dedicated 10 gigabit
per second (Gbps) wavelengths on the new Internet2 nationwide infrastructure
and will seamlessly scale by one wavelength per year for the next four to
five years in order to meet the needs of large-scale DOE Office of Science
projects such as DOE's participation in the Large Hadron Collider, the
Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Lab and several
supercomputing centers. The network will deliver production IP capabilities
and new optical services like point-to-point dynamic circuits which will
serve as an advanced and dependable platform for scientists and researchers
supported by ESnet.

"ESnet and Internet2 share a common technical vision for the evolution of
dynamically delivered network capabilities that will enable the
next-generation of scientific breakthroughs," said Bill Johnston, head of
ESnet at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. "In creating this
partnership, ESnet and Internet2 will extend the most cutting-edge network
capabilities with guaranteed carrier-class dependability, allowing our
scientific community to focus its resources on its core research and
educational objectives."

ESnet, funded by DOE's Office of Science and operated by Lawrence Berkeley
National Laboratory, connects more than 30 DOE laboratories and provides
networking to over 100,000 DOE laboratory scientists. It is also used by
more than 18,000 researchers from universities, other government agencies
and private industry. ESnet directly serves major science facilities
including particle accelerators, supercomputing centers, and massive
scientific data storage systems.

Among the most ambitious projects to be undertaken by physicists around the
globe is the new Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, which will be the
world's largest particle accelerator. Expected to go online by the end of
2007, the LHC is a collaboration by over two thousand scientists from
universities and laboratories around the world investigating fundamental
questions about matter and the origins of the universe. In the U.S.,
researchers at universities and laboratories will participate in this global
research effort through the ESnet4 network, enabling the analysis and
transmission of multiple-terabytes of data from the LHC in Geneva,
Switzerland.

"This partnership will provide a quantum leap in providing the network
support required by our scientific research community, and is a natural
culmination of the extremely close working relationship the DOE networking
community has had with Internet2," said Scott Bradley, network operations
and voice services manager at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York.
"While DOE laboratories have had to deal with network throughput
requirements of unprecedented scale -- Brookhaven's wide area network
requirements have increased by a factor of 64 over the past five years --
the overwhelming majority of our data transfer requirements have been to
institutions outside of DOE. This partnership with Internet2 will greatly
enhance our operational networking capabilities between labs such as
Brookhaven, and the multitude of non-DOE academic and scientific research
institutions we collaborate with."

Today, Internet2's network connects over five million users at 270 research
and education institutions in the U.S. and also provides access to over 80
international research networks. This partnership will allow university and
lab researchers participating in ESnet activities to leverage their
institutions' Internet2 network connection to access the ESnet4
infrastructure and its global network partners around the world.

The new ESnet4 infrastructure will be provided by Internet2 through its
recently announced agreement with Level 3 Communications to develop and
deploy a new advanced nationwide hybrid network infrastructure with enhanced
IP services as well as new dynamic optical capabilities that will serve the
broad Internet2 member community. Through the agreement with Internet2,
Level 3 will provide the underlying bandwidth services over a dedicated
optical platform with carrier-class reliability. Internet2 and ESnet will
operate the ESNet4 optical infrastructure to provide flexibility and control
in the dynamic provisioning of lightpaths and sub-channels needed to support
today's large-scale and highly complex scientific research. Level 3 will
deploy Infinera's Digital Optical Networking equipment across its
infrastructure to enable Internet2 users to provision optical circuits
dynamically. The new Internet2 network builds upon successful tests of
dynamically provisioned optical waves for ESnet conducted earlier this year
by the Hybrid Optical and Packet Infrastructure (HOPI) project of the
Internet2 member community.

"The partnership with ESnet will significantly advance the networking
capabilities of the U.S. scientific community as well as extend the
collaborative opportunities of the Internet2 research and education
community," said Douglas Van Houweling, president and CEO of Internet2.
"This is an important milestone in our mission of the past 10 years to
develop and deploy next-generation networking technologies and applications
and to engage and support collaboration among academia, science, government
and business."

About ESnet
ESnet is a high-speed network serving thousands of Department of Energy
scientists and collaborators worldwide. A 20-year pioneer in providing
high-bandwidth, reliable connections, ESnet enables researchers at national
laboratories, universities and other institutions to communicate with each
other using the collaborative capabilities needed to address some of the
world's most important scientific challenges. Funded principally by DOE's
Office of Science, ESnet services allow scientists to make effective use of
unique DOE research facilities and computing resources, independent of time
and geographic location. ESnet is managed by Lawrence Berkeley National
Laboratory. For more information: http://www.es.net/

About Internet2
Internet2 is the foremost U.S. advanced networking consortium. Led by the
research and education community since 1996, Internet2 promotes the missions
of its members by providing both leading-edge network capabilities and
unique partnership opportunities that together facilitate the development,
deployment and use of revolutionary Internet technologies. Internet2 brings
the U.S. research and academic community together with technology leaders
from industry, government and the international community to undertake
collaborative efforts that have a fundamental impact on tomorrow's Internet.
For more information: http://www.internet2.edu/

Media Contacts:
Lauren Rotman, Internet2

202.331.5345

Jon Bashor, ESnet

510-486-5849