ESnet History
The Energy Sciences Network’s roots stretch back to the mid-1970s, when staff at the CTR Computer Center at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory installed four acoustic modems on a borrowed Control Data Corp. 6600 computer and connected it to ARPANET.
The network now known as ESnet was created in October 1986 as a merger between the Magnetic Fusion Energy Network, or MFEnet — which connected Livermore's Magnetic Fusion Energy Computing Center to researchers at General Atomics, Los Alamos, Oak Ridge, and Princeton Plasma Physics Lab — and the High Energy Physics Network, or HEPnet. ESnet began offering networking services less than two years later.
Since then, the ESnet network has gone through six distinct iterations, won numerous awards, and achieved many milestones in networking. Today it is America’s premier network dedicated to scientific research, supporting Department of Energy-funded collaborations around the globe as well as serving as the backbone of the Genesis Mission’s American Science Cloud platform.
To learn more about ESnet's history, read the October 2026 feature story, "Four Decades of Accelerating Science: ESnet Turns 40," or check out our 2022 interactive timeline below, created as part of the ESnet6 launch.
Timeline
Check out the timeline in full-screen mode
Historical Highlights
In 2018, the Department of Energy's Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research marked 40 years of support for high-performance networking and computing by preparing a series of highlights. ESnet provides the following highlights of networking-related research:
Algorithms to keep the Internet from collapsing: In 1986, the burgeoning Internet was nearly two decades old and had 10,000 users. It was also facing imminent collapse due to network congestion. Van Jacobson, a network researcher at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, dove into the problem and co-authored the solution that is still in use today. At that time, ESnet was in its infancy and Berkeley Lab staff were among those helping to shape networking protocols and infrastructure. Read the full highlight.
ESnet’s Science DMZ Breaking Down Data Barriers, Speeding up Science: From individual universities around the country to a consortium of research institutions stretching the length of the west coast of the United States, networking teams deployed an infrastructure architecture known as the Science DMZ developed by ESnet to help researchers make productive use of ever-increasing science data flows. Read the full highlight.
Using Software to Better Define Network Functionality: Tracing its roots back to the days of dial-up modems in the 1970s, ESnet has consistently worked to make the network faster and more robust. Typically this has been done by taking advantage of new data transfer technologies and upgraded hardware. But with the emergence of software-defined networking, ESnet pioneered new possibilities for automatable networking in real time. Read the full highlight.
