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CENIC, Pacific Northwest Gigapop, and Internet2 Extend West Coast Agreement

Categories Cultural & Scientific RENS & NRENS Press Release

Tags esnet internet2 national science foundation pacific wave prp science dmz

CENIC, Pacific Northwest Gigapop (PNWGP), and Internet2 announced today that they will renew their collaboration to provide networking capabilities across the entire West Coast of the United States, and to continue their joint efforts to develop new network capabilities. The term of the renewal is five years (2017 – 2022) with additional extensions possible.

This shared infrastructure, using CENIC and PNWGP fiber-optic cable and Internet2’s Ciena optical system, supports the West Coast portion of Internet2’s nationwide backbone network. It also supports other CENIC and PNWGP networks and network initiatives, including the West Coast backbone of the Pacific Wave International Exchange, as well as the underlying infrastructure for the core of the National Science Foundation-funded Pacific Research Platform (PRP).

This shared infrastructure will enable further upgrades of the Pacific Wave International Exchange, a project of CENIC and PNWGP, which provides a distributed, ultra-high performance interconnection and peering fabric that links US researchers and their international partners. Twenty-seven networks representing more than 40 countries throughout the Pacific Rim, the Americas, and the Middle East connect to one another via Pacific Wave. Presently, Pacific Wave has access nodes in Los Angeles, San Jose, Seattle, Denver, Albuquerque, and El Paso and is directly connected to the StarLight International Exchange in Chicago, providing connectivity to all major European R&E networks. Additional new nodes of Pacific Wave are planned for December 2017 in Texas and Oklahoma.

“This is a significant collaboration with Internet2, one of several, which enables network interconnection and transit capabilities for our US and international research partners in order to achieve the performance and service capabilities required by researchers who depend heavily on high-speed access to large datasets, remote scientific instruments, multi-institutional collaborations, and computing resources,” noted Louis Fox, president and CEO of CENIC.

“We have a long history of collaboration with CENIC and PNWGP, and it’s imperative that we continue to support the big data requirements of some of the world’s most extraordinary research projects,” noted Howard Pfeffer, president and CEO of Internet2. “This is exactly why this partnership is so important because it allows us to collectively support scientific research and discovery for research and education communities in the US and beyond.”

“By working together and co-investing shared resources, PNWGP, CENIC, and Internet2 have made it possible for all of us to do much more, and in reality do it better, with less than if we pursued these infrastructure deployments alone,” noted Ron Johnson, CEO of PNWGP. “That has proven true not only in terms of the clear economic and operational advantages we have all enjoyed, but also in terms of the important intellectual synergies it has generated in our thinking about, and working together towards, the next generation of capabilities we can develop.”

Maps of Pacific Wave and Internet2 topologies:

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