Whoosh! DOE unveils blazing fast 100 Gbit scientific research network

Yesterday the Department of Energy – that's the infamous 3^rdfederal department that Rick Perry would get rid of, if he could just remember not to forget it – officially unveiled a super-speedy internet research network that connects supercomputing centers in three states. The DOE says the new network, dubbed the Advanced Networking Initiative (ANI), will lead to a dramatic data transfer speed improvement in research involving, among other interesting stuff, climate data and astrophysics visualizations.

The idea is that the 100 gigabits per second – for the layman, that's really freaking fast – network will not only aid in current research projects, but will lay ground for future commercialization efforts. It was funded using some of the economic stimulus funding from 2009.

Current technology used by internet service providers uses fiber-optic cables that max out at around 10 gigabits per second. That bandwidth is in turn split up among anyone and everyone connected to the cable, so end-user bandwidth for a typical consumer is many, many times slower. As the DOE explains in their announcement:

A 3G cell phone provides roughly 2Mbps for downloading data.  A 100 Gbps network connection is therefore able to receive data about 50,000 times faster than your iPhone.Here's another way to look at it. In the roughly one hour it takes a typical home Internet connection to download an HD movie, the Department's network could download, for example, 20 years of data from the Hubble space telescope.

The plan is to link all of the DOE national laboratory sites via the super-highspeed ANI network by the end of next year.

Here's some of what researchers using ANI will be working on:

Physicists seeking to understand the most basic building blocks of matter can access data generated by millions of atoms as they smash into each other deep underground at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland.

Climate researchers hoping to better understand the extreme weather effects of climate variation will have access to some of the world’s largest databases to improve the accuracy of their estimates.

Researchers working on biofuels can access the DOE Joint Genome Institute’s vast store of genomic data on energy-relevant microbes and plants.

Computer scientists can perform national scale experiments with brand new network technologies with the goal of reinventing the structure of the Internet to provide a platform for new economic opportunities.

Here's lots more information on the network.

And here, two videos demonstrating the difference between visualizing the universe at 10 Gbps, and at 100Gbps:

The universe at 10 Gbps

The universe at 100 Gbps

Pretty cool.