ACADEMIA

Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Jaguar, the nation's most powerful computer, is now connected to the Advanced Networking Initiative network, which allows users to move vast quantities of data in areas such as energy assurance, climate simulation and basic sciences.

The Department of Energy network, unveiled at SC11 (http://sc11.supercomputing.org/), the premier international conference on high-performance computing, provides unprecedented bandwidth speed - 100 gigabits per second. This represents a tenfold increase in data capacity. The network connects thousands of researchers using supercomputers at Oak Ridge, Argonne and Lawrence Berkeley national laboratories and helps solve problems associated with storing massive amounts of data. Instead, the data can be quickly moved and stored offsite.

The Advanced Networking Initiative is the first step in the nationwide upgrade to DOE's Energy Sciences Network, managed by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory for DOE's Office of Science. The upgrade will allow researchers to use supercomputing to solve some of the nation's most difficult problems.