The U.S. Department of Energy’s Energy Sciences Network (ESnet) and GÉANT, Europe’s leading collaboration on e-infrastructure and services for research and education,have boosted the capacity of ESnet’s network loop in Western Europe to 200 Gbps.
This upgraded network connects to ESnet’s 400 Gbps transatlantic network.
“This upgrade to 200G is an important milestone for ESnet because it opens up more bandwidth, network reliability, and flexibility at a time when the demands from high energy physics experiments and other scientific instruments are rapidly increasing,” said Chris Cummings, a network engineer at ESnet.
Cummings notes that this milestone also allows ESnet engineers to do maintenance and upgrades with less overall impact to the network. This is especially important as ESnet rolls out its next-generation ESnet6 network architecture in Europe in 2023.
“ESnet6 is increasing the amount of data that we can transfer across our network and then, around the world. In its simplest terms: we are increasing the size of the ‘pipes’ carrying the data to accommodate the growing data sets being generated by scientific instruments and experiments across the globe. That, and the need for innovative network technologies to route the data, is what’s driving Research & Education networks to upgrade,” said Kate Mace, ESnet6 Project Director.
“The decades-old collaboration between global R&E networks like ESnet and GÉANT is highly valuable because we share the common goal of making science successful and supporting the needs of global research,” said GÉANT’s Tom Fryer, Head of International Relations. “This common goal only grows more important as scientific discovery increasingly relies on global collaboration.”
