Pacific Wave (PacWave) is a distributed, Research and Education (R&E)-focused, open Internet Exchange. It provides for very high-performance Internet connectivity among US Science and Engineering R&E institutions and their international partners and is critical infrastructure for access to internationally supported instruments and large-scale data sources and repositories. 

PacWave 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. 

PacWave includes the following services on their own dedicated but interconnected wavelengths:

• A distributed, fully open, peering and exchange fabric with access points on a 100g+ backbone that spans Seattle, Sunnyvale and Los Angeles to which nearly all Pacific Rim R&E networks connect and which is in turn interconnected with all USA R&E backbones including Internet2 and ESnet (each with multiple 100g connections) as well as the major cloud providers and international ISPs.
• A wide-area Research DMZ platform with a dedicated 100g backbone among Los Angeles, Sunnyvale, and Seattle and also access in Tokyo (at WIDE/T-REX and Tata pops), Denver, Albuquerque, El Paso, and Chicago (at StarLight) via shared 100g wavelengths.
• A parallel, dedicated SDN/SDX testbed with access points in Seattle, Sunnyvale and Los Angeles, enabling collaborative efforts with StarLight, WIDE/T-REX, and others to explore regional and international interoperability of next-generation network and exchange capabilities.
• An express route across the United States via the AP-REX collaboration between Internet2 and PacWave.

PacWave is a joint project of CENIC, the Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California, and the Pacific Northwest Gigapop (PNWGP).