Sep 18, 2025

Community Connections: The Network, Services, and Collaborative Opportunities Made Possible by CENIC

CENIC is most often associated with the high-performance fiber-based network backbone that it created in 1996 on behalf of California’s research and education community—the 8,000-mile California Research and Education Network (CalREN). The CalREN backbone is the foundation for all of the services and benefits we provide to our members.

Statewide Connectivity: CENIC Member Endpoint Maps

Reaching out from the CalREN backbone, thousands of circuits purchased at bulk rates on behalf of our members and managed by CENIC reach every part of California, extending the backbone connection to thousands of schools, colleges, universities, libraries, and other research and cultural organizations. All of these endpoints are connected to CalREN either directly or via intermediate aggregation sites, such as main libraries and county offices of education, which provide connectivity to CalREN for other endpoints through their own connections.

Over these direct and aggregated connections, data traffic from all CENIC member sites travels to and over the CalREN backbone to other CENIC members and colleagues throughout the US and the world via other research and education networks, commercial cloud providers, and the commercial Internet thanks to CENIC’s settlement-free peering relationships. Our network services and peering connections are available to all CENIC members whether they connect directly to the CalREN backbone or through an intermediate site.

Take a look below at the endpoint maps for each segment of the CENIC membership to see how thorough the high-performance connectivity provided by CENIC is for California’s research and education community.

The next time you see the CalREN backbone, remember that it’s only the beginning of the story. The rest is told by the thousands of sites and the millions of Californians in every corner of the state whose research, education, and career ambitions are carried across that backbone along with their data traffic.

There’s even more information about how your students, faculty, staff, and patrons benefit from CENIC membership at our new Community Portals. There you’ll find some of the significant ways your institutions have put their CENIC membership into action, a timeline of CENIC history focused on your segment, and quick links to your segment’s maps, the CENIC Project Management Office, the Network Operations Center, and more.

Enabling Collaboration Among All Research and Education Communities

Of course, CENIC does not just connect network sites and endpoints. We connect people. CENIC functions uniquely as the largest technology roundtable in the state, where most of its research and education community comes together to discuss ideas and best practices on how to use the networking and services CENIC provides, to learn how their colleagues are using the network, and to collaborate with one another to create extraordinarily cost- and time-efficient resources that could not be created any other way.

An excellent example of this is the CENIC AI Resource (CENIC AIR), a distributed high-performance compute and storage infrastructure specially created to enable collaborative research and education centered on AI and machine learning and to which members of the CENIC community voluntarily contribute hosted equipment.

Contributing hosted resources is not required for a CENIC member institution to make use of CENIC AIR, however. If you’d like to learn more about how your institution can connect to CENIC AIR, you can find a general guide to connecting as well as a CENIC AIR FAQ at our website. Additionally, through our CENIC AIR Champions Map, you can find other colleagues in various administrative and research roles and learn why and how they joined CENIC AIR and how they are making use of it.

Please contact Tom DeFanti at tdefanti@cenic.org to learn more about connecting to CENIC AIR and contributing compute and storage resources.

Another initiative created by CENIC to foster network-driven results among members is the CENIC Community Technology Affinity Group (C2TAG). The C2TAG is a forum for representatives from all
CENIC member segments and CENIC staff to share information and expertise about network
technologies,creating a community of like-minded professionals who serve their colleagues as
trusted advisors.

If you’re at a CENIC member institution and would like to find out what CENIC has planned for the future and how your colleagues throughout the state are putting their connectivity to use, and if you would like to contribute to these conversations, you can join the C2TAG today and visit the website to learn when the next quarterly meeting will take place.

And of course our biennial conference, The Right Connection, continues to be one of the premiere events focused on network-enabled research and education in the country. Attendees at The Right Connection network with colleagues from all CENIC segments, attend engaging presentations and panels, share insights and opinions, discover opportunities for collaboration, and see live demonstrations of cutting-edge technology.

The next conference will take place from March 29 to April 1, 2026, in Monterey, CA. A Call for Proposals and early bird registration will be coming in early fall. We hope to see you there, and we are certain that if this is your first time attending, it will not be your last!

Related blog posts

Explore the Future with Jupyter Notebooks and CENIC AIR

Jupyter notebooks are key tools for various research and data science tasks, such as exploratory data analysis (EDA) and scientific analysis, and educational uses. CENIC members are in an ideal position to use Jupyter Notebooks with the CENIC AI Resource (CENIC AIR).

CENIC Completes 800 Gbps Upgrade to California Research and Education Network

CENIC has completed its 800G backbone upgrade, and by the end of this year, all suitable segments will be transitioned to coherent pluggable optics.