News for and about the Internet2 community

["Lauren Rotman" <>]

DOE Launches First Segment of its Next-Generation Nationwide Network to
Support Scientific Research Efforts 

WASHINGTON, DC- May 30, 2007 - The U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Office
of Science and Internet2 announced today that the first segment of a
next-generation, nationwide network has gone live, marking a key step in
significantly upgrading networking services to thousands of scientific
researchers across the country and around the world. The first complete
national ring of DOE's Energy Sciences Network (ESnet4) will be rolled out
segment by segment from the east coast to the west coast and is expected to
be fully operational by September, 2007.  

"The launch of this first segment of ESnet4 represents a significant step
toward a state-of-the-art optical network that is a critical component
supporting the United States' scientific leadership," said Dr. Raymond
Orbach, DOE Under Secretary for Science.  "Not only does this new
architecture provide greater bandwidth and higher reliability for DOE
researchers, but it also underscores the support of DOE's Office of Science
to the entire U.S. university community."

The first segment connects the Washington D.C. area to New York and Chicago
through a partnership between Internet2 and ESnet that was announced in
August, 2006. Once completed, ESnet4 will be the most advanced and reliable,
high capacity nationwide network supporting scientific research efforts of
the DOE research community. By providing reliable high bandwidth access to
DOE laboratories and other major research facilities, ESnet4 will enhance
the capabilities of researchers and scientists across the country, and their
international collaborators, to use large-scale instruments to advance the
scientific mission of the Office of Science.

This collaboration between ESnet and Internet2 brings together two advanced
networks which have a combined 30 years of experience in providing network
support to thousands of researchers around the world.  ESnet, funded by
DOE's Office of Science and operated by DOE's Lawrence Berkeley National
Laboratory, connects more than 20 DOE laboratories and provides networking
to more than 50,000 DOE laboratory staff and scientists.  ESnet is also used
by more than 18,000 researchers from universities, other government agencies
and private industry.  ESnet directly serves major Office of Science
facilities including particle accelerators, supercomputing centers and
massive scientific data storage systems. 

"As the first links of our new architecture enter production, the ESnet and
Internet2 staffs have been working very hard to build out the rest of the
production links-all of which is being done on an exacting timeline," said
Bill Johnston, head of the ESnet Department at Lawrence Berkeley National
Laboratory. "The close working relationships we have developed over the
years with Internet2 are now paying big dividends for the U.S. research
community and their international collaborators."

The new network will initially operate on two dedicated 10 gigabit per
second (Gbps) wavelengths on the new Internet2 nationwide network which is
being delivered in collaboration with Level 3 Communications. The network is
designed to scale seamlessly over the next several years to meet the complex
needs of large-scale research projects like those of the DOE Office of
Science. 

"Since announcing our partnership in August, we have made steady progress
toward deploying our new optical infrastructure on which ESnet4 is being
built and are pleased to put the first major segments into production," said
Doug Van Houweling, Internet2's president and CEO. "The new ESnet4 network
will allow university and lab researchers participating in a broad range of
scientific research to leverage their institutions' existing Internet2
network connection to access the ESnet4 infrastructure and its wide range of
Office of Science facilities."

Among the most ambitious projects to be undertaken by physicists around the
globe is a series of experiments at the new Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at
CERN, near Geneva, Switzerland, which will be the world's largest particle
accelerator. Expected to go online by the end of 2007, the LHC experiments
are collaborations involving thousands of 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 and DOE's USLHCnet
(operated by Caltech) which will transport the petabytes/yr of LHC
experiment data to two national data centers in the U.S. - Brookhaven
National Lab in New York and Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in
Illinois, both of which are ESnet sites. From these two U.S. centers the LHC
data will be sent to the university-hosted "Tier 2" centers for further
analysis.  

Internet2 is a U.S. advanced networking consortium led by the research and
education community since 1996.  Internet2 provides both leading-edge
network capabilities and unique partnership opportunities that together
facilitate the development, deployment and use of revolutionary Internet
technologies. Internet2 is in merger discussions with National LambdaRail
(NLR), a major initiative of U.S. research universities and private sector
technology companies to provide a national scale infrastructure for research
and network experimentation. NLR has also collaborated with ESnet to provide
circuits for portions of ESnet's Science Data Network and such a merger
would contribute directly to ESnet's goal of strengthening the U.S. research
and education community network infrastructure.

For more information about Internet2 visit: http://www.internet2.edu

For more information about Esnet visit: http://www.es.net/

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NEWS MEDIA CONTACTS:                         
Jeff Sherwood (DOE), (202) 586-5806                           
Lauren Rotman (Internet2), (202) 331-5345       
Jon Bashor (ESnet), (510) 486-5849