Network spanning North Atlantic gets public demonstration at Supercomputing 14 this week.

November 17, 2014

2 Min Read

NEW ORLEANS, La., Nov. 17, 2014—Internet2, NORDUnet, CANARIE and SURFnet, four advanced Research and Education (R&E) Networks from both sides of the North Atlantic Ocean, today announced the completion of a collaborative advanced network, called ANA-200G, that spans the North Atlantic, enabling R&E users to transfer data between North America and Europe at speeds that were previously only possible within the continents.

ANA-200G is a redundant 100 Gbit/s ring between four open exchange points spanning the North Atlantic. The ring nature of ANA-200G without single points of failure protects against an outage in the unprotected individual 100 Gbit/s transmission paths. ANA-200G builds on the success and the lessons learned in the pilot phase that started in June 2013 and ended last month, and was called ANA-100G.

Before this milestone, intercontinental transmission speeds lagged behind one generation compared to the advanced networks on the continents. This brand new 100 Gbit/s ring enables clear channel 100 Gbit/s data transfers for R&E between researchers in the United States and Northern Europe. Demonstrations of ANA-200G will take place this week at SuperComputing (SC14) in New Orleans.

Data transfers in science disciplines such as high-energy physics, genetics, climate research, and radio-astronomy are ever increasing. Not only are datasets increasing rapidly in size, also the speed at which they can be generated and be processed is constantly increasing. Having R&E Networks that push the envelope in advancing the state of the art of data networking remains as important as ever.

The open exchange points that play a pivotal role in ANA-200G are MAN LAN in New York City, WIX in Washington, D.C., NetherLight in Amsterdam, and GÉANT Open in London. At these exchange points there is an open connection policy, enabling anyone to connect to the exchange fabric. It requires permission from the link owners, of course, to use the links.

This four-partner collaboration has delivered the 100 Gbit/s ring around the North Atlantic Ocean. They are dedicated to further advancing the collaboration, undertaking research into federated operations and admission control, ensuring that demanding science applications have dedicated and resilient data transmission paths, while the general purpose R&E data traffic continues to flow, also in circumstances of an outage.

Internet2

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