The Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California (CENIC) kicked off a new phase of the California Research and Education Network (CalREN) backbone: the upgrade of major node sites to support native 400 Gbps handoffs from member institutions, beginning with the San Diego node site located at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at UC San Diego. The Sunnyvale, Emeryville, Sacramento, Riverside, Tustin, and Los Angeles node sites are scheduled to be completed through this fiscal year.
Frank Würthwein, SDSC Director and Professor in the Department of Physics and at the Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute at UC San Diego, sees great benefit to the big-data research community in California. “SDSC is excited to work with CENIC on translating innovation into practice. While the first science driver for 400G is experimental particle physics in collaboration with Caltech’s Harvey Newman, we see many other disciplines in the wings, from astronomy to cybersecurity research to genomics to neuroscience, and of course Artificial Intelligence across them all.”
“These new native 400Gbps handoffs, along with the panoply of services that CENIC currently offers — Layer2 Virtual Private Network Services, Optical Services, and Optical Spectrum Services — will further pre-position one of the world’s leading research communities with additional cyberinfrastructure tools to continue a remarkable history of scientific and medical innovations,” said CENIC’s President and CEO, Louis Fox.
- In December 2022, CENIC validated ZR Plus coherent pluggables over CENIC’s production optical line system between Los Angeles and Sunnyvale, spanning a 750 km amplified distance. The demonstration used ZR Plus coherent optics in QSFP-DD form factor installed in a router at each end. CENIC turned up a 300G optical service and confirmed the error-free performance of the service, with a comfortable operating margin.
- “We are pleased with these initial results, and we will continue to report to the community as we complete additional validations and adoption of coherent pluggables in our production network,” said Sana Bellamine, CENIC’s Director of Regional and International Infrastructure.
- The Los Angeles to Sunnyvale turn-up was completed in close collaboration with Cisco.
