Pacific Wave activated the first 100G research and education (R&E) network link between Asia and the U.S., with related transit, peering, and exchange fabric.
Pacific Wave will provide this 100Gbps capability to the National Science Foundation (NSF) funded International Research Network Connections (IRNC) TransPAC4 project, led by Indiana University.
This integrated 100Gbps trans-pacific layer 1, 2 and 3 TransPAC – Pacific Wave network fabric incorporates:
- A dedicated 100Gbps wavelength between the Pacific Wave national Research & Education (R&E) node in Seattle, U.S.A. and Tokyo, Japan
- 100Gbps peering and routing fabrics – using Brocade MLX routers – in Tokyo and Seattle
- Access and peering in Tokyo for Asian R&E networks at both the long-standing WIDE/T-REX/T-LEX Open Exchange Point, and at the newly-established Pacific Wave node at 3-8-21 Higashi-Shinagawa, Shinagawa-Ku.
- The 100Gbps connection in the U.S. using Pacific Wave’s existing 100Gbps open, distributed, wide-area peering and exchange fabric, which is based on a distributed mesh of Brocade MLX routers, across the Pacific Wave backbone, and has primary points of presence in Seattle, Sunnyvale, and Los Angeles, as well as additional 100Gbps access and peering at StarLight in Chicago
- On the U.S. side, the Pacific Wave fabric provides direct 100Gbps connectivity with multiple 100Gbps interfaces to Internet2’s Advanced Layer 2 and 3 Services (AL3S and AL2S), as well as 100Gbps connectivity to ESnet, and 100Gbps and/or 10Gbps connections to nearly all the major Asia Pacific R&E networks, U.S. Department of Energy’s ESnet, U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration N-wave, and commercial cloud providers regularly used by national and international R&E communities.
- Interconnection of the U.S.-based Pacific Wave and the Japan-based WIDE/T-REX peering, exchange, interconnection and Science-DMZ facilities, creating the first intercontinental R&E open, distributed exchange and peering fabric
- Extension of the new Pacific Wave experimental SDN and SDX fabrics across the Pacific Ocean to Asia, enabling direct interconnection with Asian R&E SDN and SDX projects, including those supported by WIDE and others. GENI, OpenFlow, and related projects will also be supported
- Connectivity to Pacific Wave’s 100Gbps wide-area Inter-institutional Science DMZ network, which has primary points of presence within Los Angeles, Seattle, Sunnyvale, and which serves as the backplane for the new NSF-sponsored Pacific Research Platform
California’s CENIC Wins Grant to Expand Pacific Wave Research Net
The Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California (CENIC), along with the Pacific Northwest Gigapop (PNWGP), was awarded a grant of nearly $3.5 million from the National Science Foundation’s International Research Network Connections (IRNC) program to expand the Pacific Wave Software Defined Exchange (SDX) over a five-year period.
The grant enables the expansion of U.S.-Asia scientific research network collaboration.
The Pacific Wave SDX, which will be deployed in Seattle, Los Angeles, and the Bay Area, is an integral component of the international effort to interconnect research and education networks using Software Defined Networking (SDN). The Pacific Wave SDX joins several other IRNC awardees to support research, development and experimental deployment of multi-domain SDXs and will serve as an innovation platform for next generation networking, including enhancing connectivity to campus and wide-area “Science DMZ” infrastructures like the Pacific Research Platform (PRP), which enables researchers to move data between labs and scientific instruments to collaborators’ sites, supercomputer centers, and data-repositories without performance degradation.
