ESnet is the high-performance network serving thousands of U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) scientists and collaborators. The Office of Science oversees more than 30 DOE laboratories, 100,000 DOE laboratory scientists, and 18,000 researchers from universities, other government agencies, and private industry who contribute to many large-scale DOE research activities like the experiments at the Large Hadron Collider project at CERN and the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Lab, and conduct research at DOE's experimental and computational facilities. Over the past few years, ESnet and Internet2 have shared a common technical vision for the evolution of dynamically-delivered network capabilities for future scientific research.
In August 2006, the two networking organizations announced a partnership to develop and deploy the next generation of ESnet using the new Internet2 Network optical infrastructure. With coast-to-coast deployment completed in November 2007, the ESnet4 network now uses several dedicated 10 Gbps wavelengths on the Internet2 nationwide infrastructure and will seamlessly scale by adding one optical wavelength per year for the next four to five years to meet the needs of the DOE Office of Science. Through this partnership, the ESnet and Internet2 communities are working together to fulfill their mutual need for the development of a scalable, sustainable, high-performance network backbone that connects researchers and scholars at Internet2 member institutions with scientists at the DOE laboratories.