Pacific Wave is a distributed, Research and Education focused, open Internet Exchange. The exchange provides high-performance Internet connectivity among US Science and Engineering R&E institutions and their international partners and is critical infrastructure for high-performance access to internationally supported instruments and large-scale data sources and repositories.
Pacific Wave enables large-scale scientific workflows to accelerate discovery in all areas of science and engineering, including high-energy physics, earth sciences, astronomy and astrophysics, biology and biomedical engineering, as well as scalable visualization, virtual reality, machine learning, and artificial intelligence.
Its strategic location on the US West Coast facilitates connection of Trans-Pacific undersea cables to US National and Regional Research Networks, such as Internet2, ESnet, and others. In collaboration with Internet2 and other US-based R&E Exchanges (StarLight, Atlantic Wave, MANLAN, and WIX), the US science and engineering community is also connected to Europe, Central and South America, Africa, and beyond, thereby supporting a truly global high-performance research platform.
The Pacific Wave International R&E Exchange has primary points of presence in Los Angeles, Sunnyvale, and Seattle offering interconnectivity among peers as well as advanced measurement, monitoring, and analytic tools. Performance data gathered from passive and active measurements characterizes network traffic, monitors incident pathology and provides visualizations. Pacific Wave’s ongoing enhancements aim to meet demands for higher data rates (400 Gbps, 800 Gbps, and beyond), making possible exploration and adoption of newly emerging technologies for improved performance, security, measurement, and monitoring.
PacWave is a joint project of CENIC, the Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California, and the Pacific Northwest Gigapop (PNWGP).
As big data gets ever bigger, researchers around the world have learned that managing these data flows is more than a matter of building bigger and bigger pipes. The challenges of managing the network and scientific workflows, as well as integrating globally distributed resources into a flexible infrastructure that meets the needs of many disciplines, have grown equally in pace with the data rates.
The Network Research Exhibitions that take place at the annual Supercomputing conference seek to address these challenges so that scientific discovery continues and researchers are empowered by the data bounty they have created rather than being overcome by it.