When Google chief financial officer Patrick Pichette said the tech giant might bring10 gigabits per second internet connections to American homes, it seemed like science fiction. That’s about 1,000 times faster than today’s home connections. But for NASA, it’s downright slow.
While the rest of us send data across the public internet, the space agency uses a shadow network called ESnet, short for Energy Science Network, a set of private pipes that has demonstrated cross-country data transfers of 91 gigabits per second–the fastest of its type ever reported.
NASA isn’t going bring these speeds to homes, but it is using this super-fast networking technology to explore the next wave of computing applications. ESnet, which is run by the U.S. Department of Energy, is an important tool for researchers who deal in massive amounts of data generated by projects such as the Large Hadron Collider and the Human Genome Project. Rather sending hard disks back and forth through the mail, they can trade data via the ultra-fast network. “Our vision for the world is that scientific discovery shouldn’t be constrained by geography,” says ESnet director Gregory Bell.
In making its network as fast as it can possibly be, ESnet and researchers are organizations like NASA are field testing networking technologies that may eventually find their way into the commercial internet. In short, ESnet a window into what our computing world will eventually look like.
The Other Net
The first nationwide computer research network was the Defense Department’s ARPAnet, which evolved into the modern internet. But it wasn’t the last network of its kind. In 1976, the Department of Energy sponsored the creation of the Magnetic Fusion Energy Network to connect what is today the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center with other research laboratories. Then the agency created a second network in