Through mutually-beneficial partnerships, Internet2 has established ties with scores of research and education networking organizations in other countries to help ensure the continued global interoperability of advanced networking, and enable collaboration between U.S. researchers, faculty, students, and their overseas counterparts.
Through these partnerships and the National Science Foundation's (NSF) International Research Network Connections (IRNC) program, users of the Internet2 Network enjoy connectivity to over 88 research and education networks around the world. Several Internet2 community member organizations are awardees under the IRNC program and Internet2 has worked with each to interconnect their links to the Internet2 Network. Internet2 staff participate in monthly IRNC management meetings and participated in the fall 2006 IRNC review in support of the program.
Beyond infrastructure and connectivity, Internet2 works particularly closely with the GEANT2 project (Europe), ESnet, and CANARIE (Canada) on the coordination of technical direction and development across a range of network, performance, and middleware technologies. This collaboration has already resulted in the joint development of the perfSONAR measurement and monitoring infrastructure being adopted by the Internet2, ESnet, and GEANT2 networks. Similar joint development work is underway currently on inter-domain control software for dedicated circuit services.
With the impending start-up of the CERN particle collider near Geneva, Switzerland, Internet2 staff have begun working with the international High Energy and Nuclear Physics Large Hadron Collider (LHC) community to ensure that participating U.S. universities and national laboratories will be able to operate effectively in collaboration. To accomplish this task, Internet2 and LHC are jointly developing a series of regional workshops to bring together the campus physicists and the campus, regional, state, and national network providers. To be held in 2007, these workshops will allow the various stakeholders to define what network services will be needed to support these LHC users.