Modern large-scale science requires networking that is global in extent, highly reliable and versatile, and that provides high bandwidth and supports sustained high volume traffic. These were some of the conclusions of a series of workshops conducted by the US Dept. of Energy's Office of Science that examined the networking and middleware requirements of the major science disciplines supported by the Office of Science. The requirements from the workshops have resulted in a new approach and architecture for DOE's Energy Sciences Network (ESnet), which is the network that serves all of the major DOE facilities. This new architecture includes elements supporting multiple, high-speed national backbones with different characteristics, redundancy, quality of service and circuit oriented services, and interoperation of all of these with the other major national and international networks supporting science. This paper describes the motivation, architecture, and services of the new approach. The approach is similar to, and designed to be compatible with, other research and education networks such as Internet2/Abilene in the United States and DANTE/GEANT in Europe, and so the descriptions given here are at least somewhat representative of the general directions of the networking for the research and education community.
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