perfSONAR Celebrates 20 Years of Simplifying Global Research Collaboration Through Standardized Network Measurement and Testing

The global research and education (R&E) community is celebrating a major milestone in high-performance networking and collaboration: the 20th anniversary of perfSONAR. Since April 2005, this powerful, open-source toolkit has enabled researchers and network operators to measure and troubleshoot performance across diverse network environments. 

perfSONAR’s reach has extended to all seven continents. With a vibrant user community and more than 2,000 registered instances deployed by over 1,000 organizations worldwide, it enables real-time identification of data transmission issues and supports seamless connectivity for scientific discovery.

Six R&E network organizations lead the perfSONAR development consortium: the Energy Sciences Network (ESnet), Indiana University, Internet2 and the University of Michigan in the U.S.; GÉANT across Europe; and Rede Nacional de Ensino e Pesquisa (RNP) in Brazil. perfSONAR undergoes continuous improvement stewarded by the consortium; 20 years and dozens of releases later, it continues to evolve to meet the growing demands of an increasingly interconnected R&E community.

Global Networking Requires Global Partnerships

A short informative video on perfSONAR, created by the perfSONAR project team

Global science collaborations depend on researchers being able to share data across multiple high-performance networks. Hundreds of such networks are operated by universities, governments, R&E consortiums, nonprofits and commercial entities, representing a uniquely heterogeneous mixture of hardware and protocols. 

When research teams and data are distributed across different networks, countries or continents, ensuring consistent network performance and troubleshooting problems can be challenging. Today’s large data sets and transfer protocols require predictable, very low-loss paths. Slow or unpredictable data transfers are not only frustrating — they can significantly hinder the progress of research. Compounding this challenge, scientific researchers are not typically networking experts, while network engineers often focus on the performance of the networks they operate rather than end-to-end data flow. 

Numerous factors can cause a network to run slower than designed: congestion, infrastructure flaws such as damaged cabling or hardware, configuration errors and outdated applications. The problems can span all layers of network definition and may exist at any portion of an end-to-end path. 

perfSONAR, or the performance Service-Oriented Network monitoring ARchitecture, makes it possible for participants to test key network performance measures and identify and isolate data transmission problems as they happen. Its extensible, open-source software suite runs, stores and displays active measurements such as throughput, packet loss, latency and network path. 

perfSONAR measurement nodes are easily created using readily available, low-cost hardware and the freely available perfSONAR software. These nodes can be added at multiple points along paths of interest to locate problems and provide quality assurance: at campus endpoints, demarcations between networks, within carrier points of presence, at exchange points, and near data storage and computing resources. 

Measuring on all Seven Continents

A February 2025 map of registered perfSONAR installations

The seed for perfSONAR’s genesis was an End-to-End Performance Initiative vision paper published by Internet2 in 2001. By 2004, Internet2 was working with national R&E networks GÉANT and CANARIE on joint architecture, development and tools. In 2005, ESnet and RNP joined the process, and with the coining of the perfSONAR name, the project was formally launched. 

Since then, perfSONAR has grown in scope and impact. In the early years of its existence, the founding partners maintained multiple implementations of the perfSONAR software with aspirations of interoperability. By 2013, as deployments grew past 1,000, the organizations realized that it would be easier to support and extend perfSONAR by pooling resources and jointly developing a single software product. 

The next year saw the formation of the current governance structure of the perfSONAR Consortium — a significant milestone and a model for other collaborations in the R&E network community. Indiana University joined Internet2, ESnet, and GÉANT in the new consortium, whose partners commit staff expertise and other resources to develop, maintain and support perfSONAR. The University of Michigan officially joined in 2016, followed by RNP in 2021. 

In 2017, the consortium released a new version of the software, which included a reimagined extensible version of perfSONAR that has allowed it to grow from just a few basic tests to include other tools for testing disks, wireless networks and more. perfSONAR also has evolved to use standard storage and display software, allowing for easier integration by other domain science research projects.

In 2023, perfSONAR achieved the milestone of running on all seven continents when it was deployed at McMurdo Station in Antarctica to validate satellite connectivity. Today, perfSONAR consists of thousands of deployments around the globe, including over 2,000 registered deployments and likely at least as many private, unregistered installations. 

The Large Hadron Collider and the Future of perfSONAR

One of perfSONAR’s scientific-collaboration success stories is its adoption amongst the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) research community. The LHC experiments generate enormous amounts of data that need to be delivered to scientists around the globe. This data must traverse a sophisticated network infrastructure that crosses multiple organizational boundaries before it reaches the scientists for analysis. Problems at any point in the path can slow down their workflows or inhibit them entirely. The LHC community quickly realized it needed to instrument as much of this infrastructure as possible to pinpoint problems. 

A 2024 depiction of the complexity of the network architecture connecting multiple R&E networks around the world to support the Large Hadron Collider Open Network Environment (LHCONE). Map created by Bill Johnston, ESnet, Enlarge photo 

perfSONAR presented an ideal solution not only to the technical challenges of identifying network issues but also to the non-technical challenges of getting buy-in across the hundreds of collaborating organizations. The project’s open-source nature, the design centering on responsibly running measurements between institutions, and the ease with which it could be shared all led to quick adoption. 

Today, there are around 300 deployments across the Worldwide LHC Compute Grid, running 15-20 million network measurements daily that have uncovered countless problems over the years. The ability to diagnose and fix these problems helped the LHC community reach its desired speed targets of a sustained 2.4 terabits per second in the 2024 LHC Data Challenge, which was designed to stress-test the network’s capabilities in preparation for the High-Luminosity LHC upgrade currently planned for 2030. That was a mere 25% of the coming HL-LHC traffic; the next Data Challenge, planned for fall 2026, will attempt 50%.

perfSONAR will be ready. The consortium continues to enhance and refine the base software to add new capabilities and improve the user experience. In addition, the perfSONAR community is exploring ways to leverage the wealth of data provided by perfSONAR using AI and other advanced analytical methods to classify and discover problems more quickly. 

The scope of perfSONAR continues to expand, such as in field-science environments where new types of testing may be required and additional constraints exist on resources such as network connectivity and power. perfSONAR’s stewards will stay focused on the project’s original mission — to help enable scientific discovery around the globe by providing fast, affordable, and actionable insight into the world’s networks. 

Celebrating 20 Years of perfSONAR at Community Events

The R&E community will commemorate perfSONAR’s 20th anniversary at several upcoming events. These gatherings offer opportunities to engage with community experts and explore the future of network performance measurement.

• Internet2 Community Exchange, April 28 to May 1 in Anaheim, California
• RNP’s annual workshop (WRNP), May 19-20 in Natal, RN, Brazil
• TNC25, June 9-13 in Brighton, United Kingdom

About the perfSONAR Consortium Members

Energy Sciences Network (ESnet)

Energy Sciences Network (ESnet) operates a high-performance network built to support and facilitate scientific research across America and worldwide. Funded by the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Science and managed by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, ESnet connects the DOE national laboratories, supercomputing facilities, and major scientific instruments, as well as additional research and commercial networks, to enable global collaboration on the world’s biggest scientific challenges. ESnet colocates perfSONAR deployments at each of its 60+ router locations in the United States and Europe. Regularly scheduled test routines verify network performance on ESnet’s core network, across transatlantic connections, to DOE labs and our partner networks around the globe. 

GÉANT

GÉANT (https://geant.org/) is the collaboration of European National Research and Education Networks (NRENs). Together we deliver an information ecosystem of infrastructure and services to advance research, education, and innovation on a global scale. The GÉANT project combines a high-bandwidth, high-capacity network with a growing range of services. These allow researchers to collaborate, working together wherever they are located. Together with European NRENs, GÉANT connects 50 million users in over 10,000 institutions. 

Indiana University

For more than 25 years, GlobalNOC at Indiana University has grown alongside the R&E networking community, expanding from a handful of people supporting Internet2’s Abilene network to more than 140 world-class service desk technicians, engineers, and developers who support partner organizations from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to regional networks such as Rhode Island’s OSHEAN. The GlobalNOC community currently includes 30+ network partners in research, education, public service, and municipal operations, ranging from small and local to global in scope and impact.

Internet2 

Internet2 is a non-profit, member-driven advanced technology community founded by the nation’s leading higher education institutions in 1996. Internet2 delivers a diverse portfolio of technology solutions that leverages, integrates, and amplifies the strengths of its members and helps support their educational, research, and community service missions. Internet2’s core infrastructure components include the nation’s largest and fastest research and education network that was built to deliver advanced, customized services that are accessed and secured by the community-developed trust and identity framework.

Rede Nacional de Ensino e Pesquisa (RNP)

The National Education and Research Network (RNP) connects universities and innovation-driven institutions through secure, high-performance internet and digital services—the RNP System. As a federal government-linked social organization, RNP supports public education and research policies, fostering collaboration and technological advancement. With a mission to promote the innovative use of advanced networks, RNP enables Brazilian science to share knowledge and engage globally, driving progress in education, research, and national development. perfSONAR is a strategic tool for RNP, supporting key operational processes such as the certification of network circuits across all RNP's 27 Points of Presence (PoPs) and the calculation of availability and performance indicators for Brazil’s academic network, the Ipê network. 

University of Michigan

The University of Michigan's Information and Technology Services (ITS) Infrastructure team designs, implements, manages, and supports the university's data and telecommunications networks. We ensure the networks accommodate daily traffic and provide the speed and bandwidth required for research, while also allowing for customized changes. Our goal is to ensure that our network never hinders data-intensive science needs involving computing, storage, and networking. We have deployed perfSONAR appliances in our network core and data centers and are working to expand this to include comprehensive perfSONAR deployment across the Core Network and BIN, as well as specific meshes for schools, colleges, and the campuses of UM-Ann Arbor, UM-Dearborn, and UM-Flint.