Academic Internet connections will be twice as fast

Communication between research institutions in São Paulo and those in foreign countries may be 2.5 times faster starting in 2015, with installation of a 100 Gbps link to Miami.

By Elton Alisson

Agência FAPESP – Researchers in the state of São Paulo may be able to send and receive data via the Internet to overseas colleagues more quickly beginning in 2015.

Next year, the ANSP (Academic Network at São Paulo), which connects researchers from São Paulo with those of other countries, plans to install a 100 gigabits per second (Gbps) link to Miami, traveling over the 10,000 kilometers (km) of underwater fiber optic cables already in place between the two cities.

With this feat, the speed of communication between ANSP-member universities and research institutions and academic networks in the U.S. and other countries, currently 40 Gbps, could be 2.5 times faster and 50,000 times faster than the broadband access most common in Brazil, which operates at up to 2 megabits per second (Mbsp).

“We’re currently in the testing phase, and this link should begin to function in the first half of 2015,” Luis Fernandez Lopez, general coordinator for ANSP, told Agência FAPESP. “It will be the first 100 Gbps academic Internet connection between the Northern and Southern Hemispheres.”

According to Lopez, the first 10 Gbps Internet link connecting São Paulo to Miami was installed in 2009. Later, three additional 10 Gbps links were installed between the two cities.

The problem is that this transmission speed has started to become saturated. “To transmit one 15-gigabit data packet, for example, there need to be two 10 Gbps links and a series of adaptations,” Lopez said.

By increasing the data transmission speed to 100 Gbps between academic networks in São Paulo and North America, it will be possible to obtain a much larger data flow in the next few years, when new super telescopes and the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland will run on more power (read more about the megatelescopes being built at: http://agencia.fapesp.br/19572).

Starting in 2015, data transmission systems will begin to be tested from the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) – a 6.4 meter-diameter wide field telescope that is being built by a North American consortium in Cerro Pachon, Chile.

That same year, the LHC is expected to begin operating at higher power, from between 13 and 14 tera electron volts (TeV), compared with the 8 TeV at which it has been running in recent years. The increase in power will be accompanied by an increase in the number of events at the collider (read more about the 2015 LHC experiments at: http://agencia.fapesp.br/19825).

“When these projects are in operation, the traffic of data between São Paulo and Miami from midnight to four o’clock in the morning is expected to be 80 Gbps,” Lopez estimated. “The 100 Gbps will be able to support this increase in data flow and allow it to be transmitted all at once.”

Lopez says that the increased speed on ANSP to Miami will benefit not only researchers in the fields of astronomy, high energy physics and digital media, who generally work with larger data packets, but also other fields. This improvement is needed because there are currently days on which nearly the entire 40 Gbps network transmission capacity between São Paulo and Miami is used.

“Regardless of the operation start date for the large astronomy and high energy physics projects, there already needed to be more bandwidth to meet the demand by researchers from the state of São Paulo,” Lopez said.

Global connection

In the beginning of this year, the academic networks of the United States (Internet2) and Europe (Géant2) began testing a 100 Gbps link between New York and Amsterdam, in the Netherlands.

The link is expected to be extended in the coming months by Internet2 from New York to Miami and San Francisco in the United States. In 2015, there will be another link with Japan maintained by the Asian academic network – the Asia Pacific Advanced Network – with a transmission speed of 100 Gbps as well.

Thus, the speed of Internet communication between researchers from the state of São Paulo and those of Europe and Asia, in addition to the United States, will be more than double by 2015.

“Starting next year, we will have a 100 Gbps backbone [main network of Internet data traffic] between Brazil, the United States, Canada, Europe and Japan,” Lopez said. “And we’re already discussing technologies for 400 Gbps links.”

Since 2004, ANSP has maintained a point of presence in Miami, at an Internet exchange point called the NAP of the Americas, where connection is made both with international academic networks as well as international commercial Internet.

The Internet exchange point is maintained by the São Paulo academic network in collaboration with the National Academic and Research Network (RNP), nationwide, and the Center for Internet Augmented Research and Assessment at Florida International University (Ciara-FIU), through international agreements.

The partnership with Ciara-FIU to establish a São Paulo academic network link with Miami began to be planned in 2002, when the Brazilian commercial Internet – born and initially managed by ANSP – started to be managed by the federal government. The São Paulo academic network then resumed its initial function of providing network infrastructure to researchers from the state of São Paulo.

“During the phase of transition, we realized that because research collaboration was becoming increasingly more international, it was critical that researchers from São Paulo be provided with good Internet connectivity; to do that, we needed to have a solid cooperation agreement with a group of researchers abroad,” Lopez explained.

“Because all the underwater cables from Brazil go to Miami and Florida International University was interested in collaborating with Latin American countries, it ended up being an ideal point for us to establish a link,” he explained.

Expanded service

FAPESP established ANSP in 1989 for the purpose of connecting researchers from the state of São Paulo, in state, to other Brazilian states and foreign countries.

Initially, the São Paulo Academic Network connected groups of researchers from the field of high energy physics at the Universities of São Paulo (USP), the São Paulo State University (Unesp) and the University of Campinas (Unicamp), in addition to the Technology Research Institute (IPT), to the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Chicago, United States.

Today, 25 years after its establishment, ANSP connects seven public universities in the state of São Paulo to 40 research institutions located in São Paulo by global computer network. It also facilitates large collaborative research projects in such fields as genomics, biodiversity, astronomy, high energy physics and photonics.

“ANSP has facilitated and continues to facilitate the conduct of scientific research that would otherwise not be done were it not for collaborative networks,” Lopez said.

The São Paulo academic network provides two important services to the research community of São Paulo State. First, it provides a point of traffic exchange so that the universities and research institutions of São Paulo are connected with academic networks from other parts of the world and with the Brazilian and international commercial Internet.

The second service is the provision of special links to groups of researchers who require their own specific connectivity, such as those from the São Paulo Research and Analysis Center (SPRACE), housed at the FAPESP-funded Center for Scientific Computing (CSC) at Unesp.

The computing organization of the SPRACE is part of the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) collaboration of the LHC and connects researchers from the high energy physics group of that institution to colleagues in Geneva, Switzerland.

“We also maintain large-bandwidth virtual circuits between São Paulo and Chile that enable researchers from here to have access to the SOAR [Southern Observatory for Astrophysical Research] telescope," Lopez explained.

According to Lopez, some of the main technological challenges for the São Paulo academic network will be to ensure security and continuity of data transmission between researchers taking part in these large collaborative research projects.

“We have to increasingly expand our network capacity so that there are no problems in conducting scientific research. A scientist involved in a large astronomy project cannot be worried about how her data packet will be transmitted from La Serena, Chile, to São Paulo.”

From July 25-27, 2014, ANSP held its 6th Half-Yearly Meeting at the main hall of the School of Medicine at USP. The event program consisted of courses and lectures on cybersecurity, new network technology and the first 25 years of ANSP.