Japan’s National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT), Singapore’s National Supercomputing Centre (NSCC) and the Singapore Advanced Research and Education Network (SingAREN) have completed a high-speed 100G international network, linking Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan and enabling faster sharing of large datasets among researchers in these countries.
NICT is Japan’s National Research and Development Agency specialising in the field of information and communications technology (ICT), while NSCC manages Singapore’s first national petascale facility with high performance computing (HPC) resources to support science and engineering computing needs for academic, research and industry communities. SingAREN is the sole provider of local and international networks dedicated for serving the Research and Education community in Singapore. SingAREN’s members consist of the Institutions of Higher Learning (IHLs), Research Organizations, Government and network industry players.
This 100G network will be the backbone of a North to South-East Asia network for international Research and Education Networks (RENs) in the region.
The network provisioned by PCCW Global, the international operating division of HKT, Hong Kong’s premier telecommunications service provider, is ten times faster than the current 10G networks in the region. Making use of PCCW Global’s vast submarine cable capacity, the SingAREN and NICT network will provide fast, quality interconnections and network resilience for various RENs across the Pacific.
Researchers and scientists in Singapore and Japan can now collaborate and share data faster and more efficiently to derive research outcomes to benefit communities, e.g. in weather/ climate studies, advanced manufacturing and engineering, healthcare and biomedical sciences, robotics/ AI, machine-learning, big data analytics, and precision engineering. The network will facilitate high-end research and education, bioinformatics, and supercomputing collaboration, for example, between NSCC Singapore and the Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo Tech), RIKEN, RIST (Research Organization for Information Science and Technology) and JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) comprising Japan’s flagship research institutions.
Dr. Fumihiko Tomita, Vice President, NICT said, “With this 100Gbps link between Japan, Hong Kong, and Singapore, NICT is anticipating further collaboration with international research institutes.”
Dr. John Kan, President, SingAREN commented, “With the establishment of the 100Gbps Research and Education network linking Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan, SingAREN looks forward to collaborating with our international partners to advocate joint advanced research, development, and education initiatives.”
Mr. Frederick Chui, Senior Vice President of Global Data Sales and Presales, PCCW Global, said, “Working with SingAREN represents an exciting opportunity for us, because not only have we been able to provide a 100G network capacity for the Singapore – Hong Kong – Japan route, but we will also be in a position to assist other research and education networks in the region.”
The link also enables the research and education community to complete a new ring network, the Asia Pacific Ring (APR), across the Pacific between Asia and North America. The Asia Pacific Ring network is a set of links and resources operated by the Parties individually to form a resilient, high speed network system in excess of 100 Gbit/s. The aim of the Asia Pacific Ring is to facilitate advanced research and education collaboration across the Pacific Ocean.
The parties to the APR collaboration are: SingAREN, NICT, NII (National Institute of Informatics, which operates the Science Information Network connecting universities and research institutions throughout Japan), Internet2 (an advanced networking consortium led by the United States research and education community), WIDE Project (a research consortium of Internet related research based in Japan), Pacific Wave, and TransPAC. Pacific Wave is a distributed international network peering facility for the Pacific Rim and beyond with peering points for network connections in Seattle, Sunnyvale, Palo Alto, and Los Angeles. Supporting 29 networks representing over 47 countries, Pacific Wave is a joint project between the Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California (CENIC) and the Pacific Northwest Gigapop. The TransPAC Collaboration is composed of a cooperative partnership with the Asia Pacific Advanced Network (APAN) and DANTE, and in further cooperation with Internet2 as well as numerous other research and education networks that will be connected through the project to continue and enhance the existing, highly successful previous two TransPAC projects.