Networking

Indiana U Helps Launch 100 Gbps Trans-Pacific Circuit

• By Leila Meyer
• 10/19/15

Indiana University is leading a collaborative project with the Pacific Northwest Gigapop to establish a trans-Pacific 100 gigabit-per-second (Gbps) circuit dedicated to research and education.

The circuit, called the TransPAC-Pacific Wave, is already operational between its node in Seattle, WA, and an access point in Tokyo, Japan. Additional work on the circuit is scheduled for completion this fall and will provide direct connectivity to the Tokyo Research Exchange. The completed circuit will be 10 times faster than current connectivity rates available to researchers between the United States and Asia.

"This milestone is great news," said Greg Bell, division director at the United States Department of Energy's Energy Science Network, in a prepared statement. "The world's hardest problems can only be solved through global collaboration, and 10-gigabit links will soon be insufficient to support large-scale science."

The TransPAC-Pacific Wave is named after the two National Science Foundation-funded projects that collaborated to establish the circuit. The TransPAC4 project is led by Jennifer Schopf, director of International Networks at Indiana University, and supports backbone circuits between the United States and Asia. The Pacific Wave project is a distributed open exchange created by the Pacific Northwest Gigapop and the Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California (CENIC). The Pacific Northwest Gigapop is the provider of the link for the TransPAC-Pacific Wave.

Schopf called the TransPAC-Pacific Wave circuit a "game changer for the world of big data research" because "researchers will now be able to share their largest databases at extremely fast speeds."

According to information from Indiana University, the TransPAC-Pacific Wave circuit will support research and education network traffic across the Pacific, as well as ultra-high-definition video distribution, real-time instrument control, telepresence, virtual reality and big data applications for research. It will also support software-defined exchange and networking, including OpenFlow, and improved interconnections between Asian research and education networks and their counterparts in the United States.