CENIC Recognizes ESnet for Partnership to Support Open and Secure Data-Intensive Scientific Research

CENIC announces recipient of 2019 Innovations in Networking Award for Research and Education Network Partner

La Mirada, CA & Berkeley, CA -- March 5, 2019 -- For collaborating on cybersecurity, network design, and technology adoption to enrich and extend the CENIC network, the Energy Sciences Network (ESnet) is being recognized with the 2019 Innovations in Networking Award for Research and Education Network Partner.

ESnet project leaders being recognized are: Inder Monga, Eli Dart, Chin Guok, Andy Lake, John MacAuley, Kate Mace, Lauren Rotman, Michael Sinatra, Denise Sumikawa, Brian Tierney, and Jason Zurawski.

Both ESnet and CENIC play key roles in advancing scientific research. Managed by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), ESnet provides services to more than 40 US Department of Energy research sites, including the entire national laboratory system, its supercomputing facilities, and its major scientific instruments. ESnet’s keen focus on high-quality network security and design, and significant efforts to support important research on pressing, data-intensive scientific challenges, has been profoundly beneficial to CENIC’s research community. CENIC’s California Research and Education Network (CalREN) is designed to meet the unique requirements of more than 20 million users, including the vast majority of K-20 students together with educators, researchers, and vital public-serving institutions.

“We collaborate with ESnet continuously,” said John Dundas III, CENIC’s vice president and chief technology officer. “Our teams regularly exchange ideas and review each other's work. We are similar in a lot of ways and our challenges are very much aligned.”

In 2016, CENIC and ESnet launched the Joint Cybersecurity Initiative to develop and align cybersecurity strategies and research projects. Both networking organizations share particular security challenges in supporting scientific research: support of open science and, increasingly, big-data science; diverse research portfolios; openness to experimentation across all intellectual domains; openness to collaborations within and across institutions – regionally, nationally, and internationally; and the need for seamless access to remote data-sources, scientific instruments, and computational resources.

“The cybersecurity partnership allows us to have conversations about the best ways to make sure that the security of our networks are informed by each other's experiences,” said Sean Peisert, CENIC’s chief cybersecurity strategist and a research scientist at Berkeley Lab. “We also exchange information about some of the best practices that we have to run our own internal organizations, be it the nature of our security teams, handling authentication or access controls, or doing assessments of vulnerabilities. We’ve been able to use each other as trusted partners and as a sounding board for bouncing ideas around because of our common interests.”

CENIC and ESnet’s peering relationship serves some of the most advanced research institutions in the world, including universities, national laboratories, supercomputing centers, and large-scale instrument facilities throughout the West. Advances like ESnet’s Science DMZ security architecture, which makes possible broad-scale scientific collaborations like Pacific Research Platform, are ensuring data-intensive research is open and secure.

The CENIC Innovations in Networking Awards are presented each year at CENIC’s annual conference to highlight exemplary people, projects, and organizations that leverage high-bandwidth networking. The CENIC conference will be held March 18 – 20, 2019, in San Diego, California. Learn more and register to attend.

©2024 Pacific Wave. The Pacific Wave International Research and Education Exchange is a project jointly operated by the Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California (CENIC) & Pacific Northwest Gigapop (PNWGP).