News for and about the Internet2 community

[Lauren Rotman <>]

Internet2 and NOAA Partner To Provide New High Capacity National Research 
Network

New NWave Network To Support 80 Terabytes of Climate Research Data Per Day

ANN ARBOR, Mich. – July 13, 2010 - Internet2 and the National Oceanic and 
Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) today announced a partnership to deploy a 
highly reliable, high capacity nationwide network that will serve to 
significantly enhance the capabilities of NOAA’s researchers and their 
partners across the country.

Funded through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), the new 
high capacity research network called "NWave” will be built on a set of 
10-Gigabit per second dedicated waves on the national Internet2 Network. The 
network waves will be used to provide dedicated, high speed, and high 
capacity connection between climate and weather researchers and NOAA’s key 
high performance computing sites across the nation.

Climate scientists around the country leverage these HPC resources to 
understand, predict, and explain changes in climate. This is accomplished by 
developing and applying state-of-the-art, computationally intensive coupled 
climate models for advancing climate research, predicting climate from weeks 
to decades, and projecting future climate out to several centuries. These 
climate predictions and projections are expected to generate approximately 80 
terabytes of data per day to support decision makers regionally to globally 
with timely and authoritative information. NWave provides the critical high 
capacity network links that can support these large data flows between sites 
as well as provide the capabilities to allow NOAA scientists the ability to 
easily share computational resources with the U.S. Department of Energy and 
other U.S. government agencies.

“NOAA is world leader in understanding and predicting the earth’s environment 
through its global network of observations, advanced modeling, and weather 
and climate research,” said Joe Klimavicz, CIO and director of high 
performance computing and communications at the National Oceanic and 
Atmospheric Administration. “This new high speed research network will 
greatly increase our ability to transparently access large volumes of higher 
resolution and more complex climate and weather analyses, predictions and 
projections.“

“The Internet2 community is excited to be an enabler of NOAA’s critical 
climate and weather research. The Internet2 Network will connect researchers 
across the country to the high-performance computing resources that are an 
absolute requirement for the kinds of distributed, collaborative 
environmental observations and analyses that will unleash the next wave of 
discoveries about our natural world,” said Rob Vietzke, Internet2 executive 
director of network services.

NWave will be backed by the operational expertise of the Indiana University 
Global Research Network Operations Center (GRNOC), which will provide 
24x7x365 professional network support as it does for the Internet2 Network 
and other advanced research and education networks in the country.

ABOUT INTERNET2

Internet2 is an advanced networking consortium led by the research and 
education community. An exceptional partnership spanning U.S. and 
international institutions who are leaders in the worlds of research, 
academia, industry and government, Internet2 is developing breakthrough 
cyberinfrastructure technologies that support the most exacting applications 
of today—and spark the most essential innovations of tomorrow. Led by its 
members and focused on their current and future networking needs since 1996, 
Internet2 blends its human, IP and optical networks to develop and deploy 
revolutionary Internet technologies. Activating the same partnerships that 
produced today’s Internet, our community is forging the Internet of the 
future. For more information, see http://www.internet2.edu.

ABOUT NOAA

NOAA understands and predicts changes in the Earth’s environment, from the 
depths of the ocean to the surface of the sun, and conserves and manages our 
coastal and marine resources.  For more information, visit 
http://www.noaa.gov.

Contact;
Lauren Rotman
202 331 5345


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