Networking for the Future: Five Ways ESnet Accelerates the Nation’s Science

Serving as a “Super-Integrator” of Labs and Facilities

ESnet has been the key link in Berkeley Lab’s several “Superfacility” projects, connecting researchers around the world to the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), the primary scientific computing facility for the DOE Office of Science’s six programs, with close to 10,000 users. ESnet’s network and NERSC’s Perlmutter supercomputer together enable real-time data processing that has accelerated the process of discovery for research in nuclear fusion, how nuclei decay, the COVID virus structure. ESnet is now the essential connective tissue for the DOE’s Integrated Research Infrastructure program, inspired in part by the success of the superfacility collaborations. The three IRI pathfinder projects, focused on Light Sources, Plasma Physics and Fusion Energy, and Climate and Earth Science, all depend on ESnet to integrate the research instruments seamlessly with high-performance computing (HPC) facilities.   

Enabling Global Scientific Collaborations

Leveraging its R&D 100 award-winning bandwidth reservation system, OSCARS, ESnet is a longtime strategic partner for the international research community of CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, and an enabler of LHC-related computing. ESnet also plays a critical role in newer international collaborations. For example, ESnet’s network helps transport the data captured by the LSST Camera of the Simonyi Survey Telescope at the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science, for the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST). ESnet collaborates with international partners to carry these incredibly data-rich images from Chile to the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in California, where astronomical object alerts are produced within 60 seconds of image acquisition.