The National Science Foundation has awarded $5 million over five years to USC under a cooperative agreement that supports the development of Pacific Wave, an international research and education peering facility along the U.S. Pacific Coast.

Pacific Wave allows data to be transferred at speeds of up to 10-gigabits-per-second.

“That’s more data transfer in one second than a standard dial-up connection can deliver in two weeks,” said John Silvester, USC Information Services Division’s vice provost for scholarly technology and principal investigator on the winning proposal.

Pacific Wave enables any U.S. or international network to connect at any of its “points of presence” – initially located in Los Angeles and Seattle – and exchange traffic with all networks participating in Pacific Wave, no matter where they are connected.

“The development of Pacific Wave and the networks that it connects gives researchers at USC and other research institutions a reliable and extremely fast way to transfer huge data sets and collaborate internationally on multi-institutional research projects,” Silvester said.

In addition to developing facilities that allow high-bandwidth, trans-Pacific academic networks to connect to U.S. networks, the project will connect two 10-gigabit links from Australia to Pacific Wave.

These links are important because they provide unprecedented levels of connectivity with the Australian academic community, and because the links pass through Hawaii, enhancing access to powerful astronomical observatories and other facilities located there.

Edward Rhodes, professor of astronomy in the USC College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, is excited about using Pacific Wave to collaborate with fellow researchers who are studying the sun.

“Thanks to Pacific Wave and the international networks to which it connects, I will be able to exchange solar data more readily with my University of Tokyo colleagues who are working with me to understand the mechanisms that drive the sun’s seismic properties, which result in ever-changing levels of solar activity,” Rhodes said.

Solar activity affects everything on Earth, from the climate to cell phone reception.

Pacific Wave will help improve short-term forecasts of solar activity by increasing the number of solar images that can be returned in near real-time to the U.S. Space Environment Laboratory in Colorado from Global Oscillation Network Group sites located in Australia, Hawaii, and India, Rhodes said.

He believes Pacific Wave also will improve data sharing among the world’s nighttime observatories, creating what some astronomers are hailing as a worldwide virtual observatory.

In addition to supporting research in science and engineering, Pacific Wave’s high-bandwidth network connections will undergird the development of high quality tele-presence, digital imaging and visual collaboration technologies.

Alexander Sawchuk, professor of electrical engineering in the USC Viterbi School of Engineering and associate director of the school’s Integrated Media Systems Center, believes Pacific Wave will enhance IMSC’s efforts to create immersive technology.

Such technology will enable people to collaborate and interact at a distance.

“We explore techniques to reproduce audio, video and other sensory information with fidelity approaching the limits of human perception,” Sawchuk said. “This requires network connections with high data rates and low delay.

“Pacific Wave will greatly enhance collaborative capabilities with our research partners in Asia, including those at Inha University in Korea,” he said.

Pacific Wave is part of the National Science Foundation’s International Research Network Connections program. Other projects in the program provide circuits that allow international research and education networks to connect to U.S. networks, such as Internet2, through exchanges such as Pacific Wave.

Richard Weinberg, research associate professor in the USC School of Cinema-Television, looks forward to enhancing his film collaborations with colleagues in Japan through Pacific Wave.

“Visual effects production facilities around the world cooperate to produce movies at the digital resolution equivalent of 35-millimeter motion picture film and will be increasingly dependent on high-speed, worldwide networks to review and revise digital film clips, computer animation and virtual sets remotely,” Weinberg said.

By providing high-speed access to Asia, Pacific Wave will be instrumental in USC’s collaborative projects with Keio University, the Tokyo University of Technology and other institutions, he said.

Administered by USC, the Pacific Wave project is being executed in collaboration with Pacific Northwest Gigapop and the Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California (CENIC), of which Silvester is chairman.

The Australian Academic Research Network and the University of Hawaii also are key partners in the project.

A founding member of CENIC, USC has operated the Los Angeles Access Point (LAAP), one of the early Internet peering exchanges, since 1996.

CENIC has partnered with USC to turn LAAP into the Los Angeles connection point for Pacific Wave.

The Los Angeles and Seattle connection points of Pacific Wave are linked by a 10-gigabit-per-second service, provided through fiber operated by CENIC and the National LambaRail – a fiber-optic computer facility for the U.S. research and education community.

“Science and engineering research today is more computation and data-intensive than ever before, and research in all disciplines is increasingly collaborative and frequently includes international partnerships,” Silvester said. “Enhanced cyber-infrastructure – of which Pacific Wave is a part – is widely recognized as an essential component to enable the next generation of science, medicine and the arts.

“Virtual observatories, earth-sensing arrays and international networks that help combat disease and bio-terrorism are just a few of the important technologies that require the high-speed international communication networks interconnected through Pacific Wave,” Silvester said.