About Pacific Wave: Today
Pacific Wave is a state-of-the-art international peering exchange facility
designed to serve research and education networks throughout the Pacific Rim
and the world. Pacific Wave enhances research and education network
capabilities by increasing network efficiency, reducing latency, increasing
throughput, and reducing costs. Pacific Wave is a joint project between
CENIC, the Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California, and
the Pacific Northwest Gigapop, and is operated in collaboration with the University of Southern California and the University of Washington.
Today, Pacific Wave is available at three U.S. Pacific coast locations: Bay Area (Sunnyvale and Palo Alto), Los Angeles (3 sites), and Seattle. Over 16 major, internationally recognized, research and education networks are among its dozens of participants. The distributed design of Pacific Wave allows participants to engage in bilateral peerings regardless of which node they are physically connected to. This design offers significant flexibility and opportunities for networks utilizing any of a dozen trans-Pacific cables for their circuits as well as for building redundancy and robustness into peering relationships that would otherwise be cost prohibitive and complex to engineer. Current participants represent networks and agencies from throughout the Pacific Rim including Japan, Korea, Australia, Canada, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, Qatar, and the United States.
Pacific Wave: Near Future
Pacific Wave, along with its partner StarLight in Chicago, are the sites where the vast majority of international R&E networks choose to land and interconnect with each other and with other networks in the US. Pacific Wave and StarLight have had for nearly a decade not just a vision, but highly successful implementations of direct, super-high-performance and highly flexible interconnection, exchange and peering among R&E networks and connectors. This is a model which has come to be used by Gigapops and others to connect nearly all of today's R&E networks to each other, and to connect most universities and research sites and resources to R&E networks and other research partners.
This model seeks to recognize, and responsively serve, the diversity of needs of different networks, connectors and users. It is a vision of providing the flexibility and adaptability needed to leverage the rapidly changing technologies, and application and project opportunities that all evolve at the pace of "internet time". It is a vision of enabling network managers and users maximal choice and diversity of approaches, to meet their needs including performance and policy requirements, while at the same time providing carrier-class production-quality super-high-performance very-low latency, low-hop-count, inter-connection, exchange and peering (with top end-to-end performance) among connectors and all significant current and future R&E network fabrics (some of which are already providing customized wavelength level services).
Pacific Wave is now actively engaged in several collaborative efforts (IRNC, GLIF, TransLight, Gloriad, etc.) to make the vision of adding allocatable, switchable lambda capabilities to our n-way open exchange fabrics a reality. Addition of such services is a natural outgrowth and evolution of our existing inter-connection exchange and switching fabrics and the shift in the telecommunications marketplace and next generation R&E networks towards inexpensive lambdas.