GROWTH
Bigger, Better, Faster
I
Data infrastructure trends that will affect research
nternet networks are vital to the world as we know it. They enable us to shop, organise our finances, connect with family and friends, educate ourselves and collaborate across geographical divides with colleagues. They’re pretty young, too. Just 30 years ago, science parks and research organisations were taking the first steps in creating high-speed connections with partner organisations. Back then, ‘highspeed’ meant 10Mbits per second, but since then, computing power and the demand for bandwidth has skyrocketed. In the 1990s, the first gene sequencing for living organisms took ten days to process just one gene sequence; today, it takes hours - and it’s getting faster by the day. Super-fast, secure private networks are the backbone of research – enabling the processing of huge amounts of data in multiple locations. Research into genomes, machine learning, quantum computing, artificial intelligence and
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Jeremy Sharp chief technology officer, JANET NETWORK
other areas now operate on connections running at 10Gbit/s per second – while 100Gbit/s connectivity is increasingly required by research centres connected to the UK’s national research and education network, Janet, which is run by the UK’s education technology solutions not-for-profit, Jisc.
THE L I F E SUPPORT
According to the latest figures from GÉANT - the European collaboration
of national research and education networks (NRENs) - the Janet Network is the busiest in Europe by volume of data carried, ferrying around 1 Exabyte of information every year. That’s enough capacity to stream 1.2 million hours of 1080p high-definition video every day – and it’s a figure that is growing by 30 percent year-on-year. To put that into context, the total global data traffic exceeded 1 Exabyte for the first time in 2004, so Janet today matches the capacity of the entire world just 15 years ago. The vast majority of traffic that goes from the UK’s Janet Network through GÉANT is research data exchanged between the likes of CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, the European Bioinformatics Institute, the Elixir project and other research environments. Janet is optimised to support very high levels of data transfer in terms of capacity,