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Originally a research concept, OSCARS has grown into a robust production service that broadly impacts the scientific community. Currently, OSCARS circuits carry 50 percent of the Department of Energy’s annual 60 petabytes of science traffic, supporting fields including high energy physics, computational astrophysics, genomics, and climate research. Since OSCARS became a production ESnet service, approximately 5,000 virtual circuit reservations have been created for demos, transient experiments, and projects.

To ensure networks can meet the time-critical needs of these experiments across multiple science domains, ESnet developed OSCARS. This software service instantaneously reserves dedicated bandwidth channels for scientists to exchange massive data sets on a global scale. Using a Web interface or an API, OSCARS allows scientists to engineer, manage, and automate their own bandwidth channels based on the specific needs of their science. Prior to OSCARS, provisioning dedicated bandwidth took weeks or months and was cost-prohibitive.

OSCARS allows scientists to automate the process of setting up their own circuits by having their workflow management systems “talk” to it directly through an easily programmed API. This is particularly useful as scientific workflow often involves many stages that must be appropriately timed and executed to achieve the desired science output. Both the OSCARS user interface and API automatically reduce to a few minutes transactions that previously took weeks or months of manual setup to accomplish.