ESnet Increases 10 Gb/s Circuits/Connections by 880 Percent in 2005-06

ESnet will install at least 44 new 10 Gb/s circuits and connections in 2005‑06. Half of these were completed and in production by November 2005, and the remaining connections should go into production by the end of spring 2006. By comparison, only five 10 Gb/s links were in place in January 2005.

These new connections are part of a new architecture that will provide 20‑40 Gb/s metro area rings to dually connect the Department of Energy’s Office of Science labs and will provide a second national core network – the Science Data Network (SDN) – for high-throughput science data and collaboration.

A significant achievement in 2005 was deploying the San Francisco Bay Area Metropolitan Area Network (BAMAN). This network consists of dual 10 Gigibit Ethernet (GE) rings that connect eight Bay Area research sites and provides 30-40 Gb/s connectivity for the Joint Genome Institute, the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, and Lawrence Berkeley, Lawrence Livermore and Sandia national laboratories.

ESnet also deployed the first three SDN circuits. These circuits provide 10 Gb/s service from San Diego to Sunnyvale, and Sunnyvale to Seattle, and an additional path between the IP hub and the SDN hub in Sunnyvale. These circuits replace 155 Mbps circuits, resulting in connections for laboratories in Southern California and Washington that are now 65 times faster.

In early 2006, ESnet will focus on deploying metro networks in Chicago, New York and Virginia-Maryland. The upgrades in Chicago will provide multiple 10 GE circuits to Argonne and Fermi labs, as well as connecting to Starlight and the ESnet backbone hub. This includes five 10 GE links to FNAL, which is a Tier 1 center for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC)project at CERN. The network in Long Island, NY, will provide two independent 10 Gb/s circuits to Brookhaven National Laboratory, which is also a LHC Tier 1 center. The network in the Washington, D.C. area will provide a single 10 Gb/s circuit to Jefferson Lab.

In addition to upgrading laboratory access links, ESnet is also improving network performance by upgrading many peering and cross-connections to 10 Gigabits to eliminate network bottlenecks between scientists at DOE laboratories, and instruments or collaborators at universities and research organizations worldwide.