Internet2 and NOAA Partner To Provide New High Capacity National Research Network

New NWave Network To Support 80 Terabytes of Climate Research Data Per Day

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Jul 13, 2010, 10:22 ET

ANN ARBOR, Mich., July 13 /PRNewswire/ -- Internet2 and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) today announced a partnership to deploy a highly reliable, high capacity nationwide network that will serve to significantly enhance the capabilities of NOAA's researchers and their partners across the country.

Funded through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), the new high capacity research network called "NWave" will be built on a set of 10-Gigabit per second dedicated waves on the national Internet2 Network. The network waves will be used to provide dedicated, high speed, and high capacity connection between climate and weather researchers and NOAA's key high performance computing sites across the nation.

Climate scientists around the country leverage these HPC resources to understand, predict, and explain changes in climate. This is accomplished by developing and applying state-of-the-art, computationally intensive coupled climate models for advancing climate research, predicting climate from weeks to decades, and projecting future climate out to several centuries. These climate predictions and projections are expected to generate approximately 80 terabytes of data per day to support decision makers regionally to globally with timely and authoritative information. NWave provides the critical high capacity network links that can support these large data flows between sites as well as provide the capabilities to allow NOAA scientists the ability to easily share computational resources with the U.S. Department of Energy and other U.S. government agencies.

"NOAA is a world leader in understanding and predicting the earth's environment through its global network of observations, advanced modeling, and weather and climate research," said Joe Klimavicz, CIO and director of high performance computing and communications at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. "This new high speed research network will greatly increase our ability to transparently access large volumes of higher resolution and more complex climate and weather analyses, predictions and projections."

"The Internet2 community is excited to be an enabler of NOAA's critical climate and weather research. The Internet2 Network will connect researchers across the country to the high-performance computing resources that are an absolute requirement for the kinds of distributed, collaborative environmental observations and analyses that will unleash the next wave of discoveries about our natural world," said Rob Vietzke, Internet2 executive director of network services.

NWave will be backed by the operational expertise of the Indiana University Global Research Network Operations Center (GRNOC), which will provide 24x7x365 professional network support as it does for the Internet2 Network and other advanced research and education networks in the country.

ABOUT INTERNET2

Internet2 is an advanced networking consortium led by the research and education community. An exceptional partnership spanning U.S. and international institutions who are leaders in the worlds of research, academia, industry and government, Internet2 is developing breakthrough cyberinfrastructure technologies that support the most exacting applications of today -- and spark the most essential innovations of tomorrow. Led by its members and focused on their current and future networking needs since 1996, Internet2 blends its human, IP and optical networks to develop and deploy revolutionary Internet technologies. Activating the same partnerships that produced today's Internet, our community is forging the Internet of the future. For more information, see http://www.internet2.edu.

ABOUT NOAA

NOAA understands and predicts changes in the Earth's environment, from the depths of the ocean to the surface of the sun, and conserves and manages our coastal and marine resources. For more information, visit http://www.noaa.gov .

SOURCE Internet2