The UK’s computer network for research and education, Janet, will now include a new service to meet the growing needs of the UK research communities for dedicated end-to-end network capacity.
The new Janet Lightpath service will separate high-volume data transfer from other traffic in the network. Users will be able to create circuits (or light paths) with capacities from a few tens of Mbit/s to 10Gbit/s, according to their requirements.
David Salmon, Research Support Unit Manager at JANET (UK), explained: ‘It became evident there was a growing requirement from high-end users for separate dedicated networks for research and development purposes.’
The new service will be used to connect research support facilities, such as high performance computing and large-scale data repositories, with experimental facilities such as particle accelerators, radio telescopes. The circuits can even be extended internationally through the Géant network to reach other research and education networks in Europe.