CANARIE to roll out new high bandwidth grid network to research community by fall

Canada’s remarkable status as a global leader in research networking is poised to continue with the construction of a radically new network allowing peer-to-peer collaboration between researchers regardless of location or bandwidth requirements. CANARIE Inc has announced contracts worth a minimum of $25 million that will see the completion of CA*net 4 by July and a full transfer from CA*net 3 to the new network by early fall. More than $10 million will be spent on research over the next five years to give linked research organizations the ability to automatically assign dedicated bandwidth to researchers at the edge of the network — a grid architecture that’s seen as the future for all Internet communication.

The go-ahead for CA*net 4 was contained in the last federal Budget which provided $110 million for construction of the network, support for regional high-bandwidth networks and national and international network costs (R$, December 17/01) (see chart).

The Budget announcement completed a long lobbying process by CANARIE and the research community that called for a new network to enable a growing trend towards multi-location, data intensive research ranging from high energy physics to bioinformatics.

“The underlying architecture is the innovative nature of this network. Capacity can be assigned to individual researchers and the holy grail is to do that automatically,” says Dr Andrew Bjerring, president and CEO of CANARIE. “There’s an increasing amount of research that features data sharing and resource sharing. We have created the core infrastructure to permit that sharing.”

The right to build CA*net 4 was won by GT Group Telecom and Shaw Communications Inc, marking the first time the network management in the CA*net program has not been handled by Bell Canada. GT is one of the few competitive local exchange carriers in Canada to survive the telecom meltdown. It has built up a critical mass of metropolitan and long haul fibre to develop a 410,000 km national fibre network, which comprises the telecom assets of several former cable companies. The network extends from Victoria BC to St. John’s NF, with links in the US to Seattle, Sacramento and New York.

Shaw Communications, Calgary, has a minority stake in Toronto-based GT Group Telecom and its Big Pipe division will provide fibre links between Vancouver and Calgary and Winnipeg and Chicago. The remainder of the links will go through GT’s national network.

“This is our largest commercial contract to date and it’s become a rallying cry for the company. It’s put us on the telecom map. Some of the other players in the sector were surprised by it (winning the contract),” says Tal Bevan, GT’s president of business operations. “We try to take an applications approach with our customers and provide bandwidth where it’s needed. Straight bandwidth doesn’t work anymore.”

The initial equipment installation includes powerful optical switches developed by Cisco Systems and routers provided by Juniper. Both firms are based in California and the selections were made after a careful examination of domestic and international suppliers. Bjerring says that the final decisions for both network management and equipment vendors were based on performance and cost. He says he welcomes the participation of Canadian telcos during CA*net 4’s research phase.

“We want to work with Canadian companies as we accelerate our research activity so they can take advantage of it as they develop their product lines,” he says. “We think we are developing a research infrastructure that will be used by the commercial networks of the future, because the existing architecture is very different.”

CA*net 4 is also a critical link in Ottawa’s plans to propel Canada into the top ranks of innovative nations by dramatically boosting R&D. Many of the projects approved in the recent Canada Foundation for Innovation were predicated on having high-capacity, peer-to-peer communications links. Other organizations such as the National Research Council have also made similar assumptions as it begins building capacity for bioinformatics and e-commerce applications in locations across Canada.

The provinces have also been extremely active in developing high-bandwidth capacity, with programs such as ORION (Ontario) and SuperNet (Alberta) pouring millions into new optical infrastructure. CA*net 4 will connect to each provincial node giving it a reach far beyond CA*net 3. It’s conceivable that within a few years, even CA*net 4 won’t be able to provide the demand for peer-to-peer connectivity. The possibility of expanding the network has been built into contingency plans.

“We’re starting with two OC192 wavelengths which will deliver 20 billion bits per second, but once you start to allocate pieces of that bandwidth to many users you could encounter restrictions in the ability to do that. We will add to the network if we need to,” says Bjerring. “The $25 million covers two bandwidths for five years but we have a contingency budget, although it’s not enough to double capacity coast to coast.”

To ensure that future demand is met, CANARIE hopes that the provincial networks, large research institutions and disciplines with high data and bandwidth demands will help cover the costs of expanding CA*net 4. As broadband connectivity spreads across the research spectrum, CANARIE is not large enough to accommodate the needs of an expanding research community dependent on high bandwidth.

“They could contribute to costs but there has to be a lot of learning before then,” asserts Bjerring. “For organizations such as the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory, the Canadian Light Source and bioninformatics users , it’s mission critical to have capacity. We’re raising this issue (share funding) with groups across the country that are most interested in grid architecture.”

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