CENIC is committed to meeting UC’s ambitious needs

World-class university systems have unparalleled networking needs. Such is the case with the University of California (UC)system, which is regularly bustling with innovation and cutting-edge research. CENIC’s connectivity and services are helping its campuses build the future by providing critical connections for more than half a million students and educators.

The University of California in Action with CENIC

The University of California (UC) system is the most prestigious and accomplished public research and education system in the world, with 71 Nobel Prizes awarded to its faculty and researchers since the creation of the awards in 1901. Its ten campuses, off-campus sites, and supercomputing and medical centers all require best-in-class networking and services to support this level of world-leading achievement, motivating the UC system’s co-founding of CENIC in the mid-1990s.

That first concept—an advanced fiber-based network to serve the state’s research and education communities—has since grown into a profound partnership enabling California to create a research and education community capable of changing society itself for the better in the coming decades. Thanks to that partnership, all ten UC campuses, off-campus sites, and supercomputing and medical centers—as well as the national laboratories for which UC provides management and oversight—enjoy future-facing networking, support, and services via CENIC’s California Research and Education Network (CalREN), specially designed by and for the state’s research and education community.

UC campuses are also a central part of the CENIC AI Resource (CENIC AIR) in terms of contributing to it and making use of it for research and education. CENIC AIR provides California’s research and education communities a platform to enable their faculty and students to contribute constructively to the global transformation promised by Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. UC faculty and students, along with those in all segments, now have access to training, research, and class lab facilities in a persistent, sustained infrastructure that will continue to evolve well into the future.

Many pressing problems confronting humanity in the coming decades will require focused study and cooperation from all of society to solve, and the University of California plays an essential role in this, as it has since its 1866 designation as one of the country’s first land-grant universities. Thus, ensuring a healthy future for humanity and the world means meeting the ever-increasing networking needs of the UC system now and in the years to come.

An excellent example of this is a collaborative public-private partnership involving UC San Diego’s ALERTCalifornia, the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (CAL FIRE) and industry partner DigitalPath. Together, they developed a powerful AI-enabled fire detection tool that was honored with CENIC’s 2024 Innovations in Networking Award for Public Safety.

UC researchers also study changes in the global climate, which requires powerful compute resources and large amounts of complex data from weather satellites, ground-based measurements, and numerical model data around the world. The computing power required to transmit, analyze, store, and display that data is now available through CENIC AIR and the National Research Platform (NRP). It is also fueled by the high-performance infrastructure of Pacific Wave, a joint project of CENIC and the Pacific Northwest Gigapop.

CENIC partners with national and international research and education, governmental, and commercial networks to expand access. It works to support broad public access to the educational, research, and cultural assets that position California for a prosperous future.

Together Since the Start

The University of California was instrumental in CENIC’s inception, and our deep partnership is even stronger today. Together, we solve some of the world’s most important problems and connect UC students, faculty, and staff.