The TransLight/Pacific Wave (TL/PW) project builds on close and effective collaborations built over the last decade among the University of Hawaii, the Pacific Northwest Gigapop (PNWGP), and the Corporation for Educational Network Initiatives in California (CENIC) to create and operate a unified distributed exchange service for Research and Education (R&E) networking in the Asia-Pacific hemisphere. TL/PW will present a unified connectivity face toward the West for all US R&E networks including Internet2, National Lambda Rail and Federal agency networks, enabling general and specific peerings with more than 15 international R&E links, including those funded by other NSF IRNC projects, serving scores of countries. Distributed peering services at network Layers 1, 2 and 3 will allow the project to seamlessly support domain-specific projects while remaining committed to equitable shared global R&E network services. TL/PW will work with Internet2, National Lambda Rail, the other IRNC awardees and international networks to provide seamless evolutionary production networking services to the international research community. The value of TL/PW to the nation and the world is demonstrated by the fact that TL/PW is not proposing to buy new international links. Rather, TL/PW funding will be used to provide domestic backhaul, hosting, support and facilitation for those engaged in R&E networking in the region.
TL/PW will provide domestic support for AARNet's SX-TransPORT project, which provides two 10Gbps circuits from Australia to Hawaii to the West Coast of the U.S. on the Southern Cross Cable Network submarine fiber system. This project not only connects Australia's R&E networking community but also provides connectivity for the world's premiere setting for astronomical observatories, the summit of Mauna Kea on the Big Island of Hawaii. The Mauna Kea observatories comprise over $1 billion of international investment by 13 countries in some of the most important cyberinfrastructure resources in the world. TL/PW will also continue to advance and support research network connections in the Australasia and Pacific regions.
The Intellectual Merit of TL/PW derives from its championing of end-to-end connectivity and network advancement that stimulates innovation among leading domain scientists and cyberinfrastructure engineers. TL/PW has innovated to create the world's model distributed exchange serving the global R&E networking community, and will continue to advance reliable and cost-effective global cyberinfrastructure to meet broader research and education needs. TL/PW will focus on emerging network-enabled sustainable services, like cloud computing, and will take on a special leadership role to support major international scientific cyberinfrastructure in areas unique to its service area: astronomy and ocean observatories. TL/PW will enable the advancement of scientific discovery, and in so doing, advance the state of cyberinfrastructure-empowered research and education.
The Broader Impact of TL/PW will result from its sweeping enablement of US researchers to easily collaborate with their colleagues in many of the fastest-developing parts of the world. TL/PW is superbly positioned to support global access to large-scale international sensor networks like the NSF-funded Ocean Observatories Initiative and the substantial international investment in telescopes that comprise the Mauna Kea Observatories. Working with major commercial players, including Amazon and Microsoft, TL/PW will actively advance the state of cloud computing services that investigators will increasingly apply in their research as a greener and more cost-effective approach to cyberinfrastructure deployment. TL/PW also plans to leverage its unique positioning to extend R&E networking into the Pacific Islands, which are central to understanding the global phenomena of climate change, sea-level rise and ocean acidification.
