A unique jewel in the global R&D community
The Energy Sciences Network (ESnet) provides networking for the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) research and development (R&D) mission requirements. ESnet is a leader in internet design and innovation, and provides a major piece of the internet backbone in the United States.
Supported by the DOE, Office of Energy Research (OER), Office of Computational and Technology Research, Mathematical, Information and Computational Sciences Division (MICS), ESnet provides for both classified and unclassified DOE mission-oriented networking for scientists, engineers, and their administrative support.
ESnet also provides scientists and engineers access to DOE's unique world-class accelerator, fusion, environmental, energy, computational and related facilities. With its integrated community, ESnet is used as a test bed for advanced R&D technologies and services in support of its end users. ESnet is involved in ambitious distributed computing projects to support collaboratory and virtual laboratory technologies across the ESnet Community. Indeed, ESnet has become an essential element across the DOE complex of laboratories and university-based researchers - a unique jewel in the global R&D community.
This report covers the most recent years of ESnet's evolution and its associated support services as they migrated from a system of T1 (1.5 megabit/second) links to the world's first large-scale Asychronous Transfer Mode (ATM) system using T3, OC3, and OC12 (45, 155 and 622 megabits/second) access and backbone interconnects.