[1st-mile-nm] CenturyLink contracts to provide Defense’s New 100 Gigabit Supercomputer Network

[Richard Lowenberg]

I assume that in NM, the two national labs and UNM will benefit, and 
wonder if there will be other connections and I2 opportunities?
RL

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Coming Soon: Defense’s New 100 Gigabit Supercomputer Network

http://www.nextgov.com/cloud-computing/2013/04/coming-soon-defenses-new-100-gigabit-supercomputer-network/62752/

CenturyLink has started work on a contract with a maximum value of $750 
million to stitch together Defense Department supercomputer centers with 
a 100-gigabits-per-second network.

CenturyLink won the Defense Information Systems Agency contract on June 
8, 2012, but the award was delayed by a protest from Verizon Business, 
which had held the high speed network contract since 2002.

Diana Gowen, CenturyLink’s senior vice president and general manager 
for government business, said DISA re-awarded her company the Defense 
Research Engineering Network III, or DREN III, contract in Dec. 2012, 
but her company did not at that time receive clearance to issue a press 
release or talk about the network, which serves as the backbone of the 
Defense High Performance Computing Modernization Program.

Gowen said the DREN III high-speed fiber optic network will span 5,000 
miles, from the Army Research Laboratory, at Aberdeen Proving Ground, 
Md., to the Maui High Performance Computing Center in Kihei, Hawaii, and 
148 other Defense, NASA and Energy Department supercomputer centers. 
DREN III will provide a 40 percent increase in the speed of the current 
Defense supercomputing network, which has a maximum data rate of 2.4888 
gigabits per second.

Extensions to the DREN network allow customers in remote Alaska to 
access high performance computing resources in the rural Midwest. “High 
bandwidth wide area networks (WAN) transfer data between supercomputing 
centers close to real-time,” according to a fact sheet from the High 
Performance Computing Modernization Program.

Gowen said CenturyLink has a backbone network that will meet the DREN 
III requirements, except for circuits to Hawaii, and added it will also 
be connected to a high-speed Internet 2 research network that connects 
60,000 U.S. educational, research and government institutions over its 
100 gigabit network.

Gowen said she expects DREN III to meet its goal of hooking up Defense 
users by December.

John West, director of the High Performance Computing Modernization 
Program, said in a statement that “DREN is an essential component of our 
program, connecting defense researchers located throughout the country 
with the department’s supercomputing resources



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Richard Lowenberg, Executive Dir.
1st-Mile Institute, 505-603-5200
P.O.Box 8001, Santa Fe, NM 87504
www.1st-mile.org  rl at 1st-mile.org
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