The United States Department of Energy is home to the fastest Internet network in the world, ESnet6, which has just been upgraded to an astounding 46 Terabits/s of capacity. The network, which will be only used for scientific purposes, will increase the rate at which nodes may share and create new discoveries.
To put things in perspective, the average home has access to 1 Gigabit/s internet, which is lightning-fast and often allows you to download movies in just a few seconds. However, the majority of homes only use a modest 100 Megabit/s bandwidth. With the ability to download around 11,500 HD movies per second, ESnet6 is an amazing 460,000 times faster than the majority of people’s existing Internet.
According to Barbara Helland, Associate Director of the DOE Office of Science’s Advanced Scientific Computing Research program, “as scientific instruments grow in complexity and supercomputers simulate scientific phenomena at higher resolutions, the science community is facing a growing challenge: data volumes that are increasing exponentially, coupled with the need to move, share, and process this data globally and faster than ever before.”
“ESnet6 provides DOE researchers with the most cutting-edge technology to help address the major challenges we face today in fields including climate science, sustainable energy, semiconductor production, microelectronics, the discovery of quantum information science, and more,” says ESnet6.
