Network Partnerships

State and Regional Networks

Our network partnerships include strong relationships with the state and regional research and education (R&E) networks that provide network capacity, capabilities and services to Internet2 members, creating a foundation for innovation. Regionals directly engage the R&E community in various ways to support education and research on campuses as well as within the various other community anchor institution communities including K-12, libraries, museums, etc. State and regional networks are also an important link in the campus-to-national backbone chain, and provide training and updates on technical advances.

An integral part of the Internet2 community, state and regional networks play an active role in Internet2 governance and membership, and continually share insights about best practices to inform the national agenda on delivering the full potential of advanced networking services for R&E. In addition, state and regional networks participate in the Internet2 community through the Network Technical Advisory Committee (NTAC) and working groups, including Peering and Routing, Software Defined Networking, IPv6 and Network Performance. Internet2 Network Services creates on-going opportunities for collaboration and interaction with and among the state and regional networks. The R&E Network Research Liaison program also fosters support of campus research and researchers among the state and regional R&E networks.

ESnet

The Energy Sciences Network (ESnet) is a high-performance, nationwide network designed and optimized to support large-scale scientific research. Funded by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science and managed by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, ESnet connects more than 40 DOE research sites, including the entire National Laboratory system, its supercomputing facilities, and its major scientific instruments.

Building on their long-standing relationship, ESnet and Internet2 partnered in 2009 to use their respective American Research and Recovery Act (ARRA) funds to invest in a national fiber optic cable footprint, equipped with a scalable optical system that can support 8.8 Terabits of capacity. ESnet and Internet2’s relationship is critical to both organizations because nearly 80% of the data flows that originate at an ESnet-connected facility terminate at a university. Ensuring that researchers can access their data anytime, from anyplace is vital for modern science collaborations. The joint investment by both national networks positions them to support data-intensive science for decades to come.

In addition to their network collaboration, Internet2 and ESnet also work together to advance important community projects such as perfSONAR, and on efforts to evangelize best practices in local campus network architectures.

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Network

Funded through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), the new NOAA high-capacity research network, called NWave, is built on a set of 10-Gigabit per second dedicated waves on the national Internet2 Network. The network waves are used to provide dedicated, high-capacity connections between climate and weather researchers and NOAA’s key high-performance computing sites across the nation.

Climate scientists around the country leverage these HPC resources to understand, predict, and explain changes in climate. This is accomplished by developing and applying state-of-the-art, computationally intensive coupled climate models for advancing climate research, predicting climate from weeks to decades, and projecting future climate out to several centuries. NWave provides the critical high capacity network links that can support these large data flows between sites as well as provide the capabilities to allow NOAA scientists the ability to easily share computational resources with the U.S. Department of Energy and other U.S. government agencies.