Our Mission
ESnet's Mission is to enable and accelerate scientific discovery by delivering unparalleled network infrastructure, capabilities, and tools.
ESnet's Vision is summarized as these three points:
- Scientific progress will be completely unconstrained by the physical location of instruments, people, computational resources, or data.
- Collaborations at every scale, in every domain, will have the information and tools they need to achieve maximum benefit from scientific facilities, global networks, and emerging network capabilities.
- ESnet will foster partnerships and pioneer the technologies necessary to ensure that these transformations occur.
ESnet provides high-performance connections that link tens of thousands of Department of Energy (DOE) scientific researchers at the 17 national laboratories, 28 user facilities, scientific instruments, universities, and other research institutions across the U.S. and Europe, enabling them to collaborate on some of the world's most important scientific challenges, including energy, extreme weather modeling, and the origins of the universe. user facility funded by the DOE Office of Science, ESnet is stewarded by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
ESnet has a strong ethos of leadership in networking innovation. Our team is constantly improving the services to create a more versatile and robust network to serve the emerging needs of scientific researchers. We work closely with the international technical community to develop open-source software and collaborative technical projects. Our programs, as well as our collaborations with other research and education networks around the world, demonstrate our commitment to pushing network research forward so we will be able to anticipate and flawlessly serve the needs of DOE scientists.
As computational tools such as simulation and visualization become more fine-tuned and sophisticated, they also require the processing and management of greater amounts of data. The sheer volume of data generated by international scientific collaborations and the increasingly distributed nature of large data flows, as well as the development of real time cloud computing, is creating a staggering volume of network traffic. Since 1990, ESnet's average traffic has grown by a factor of 10 every 47 months. This growth trend is only accelerating with the increasing use of AI/ML, the need for High Performance Computing (HPC) resources, and as international scientific collaborations such as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) generate and exchange ever more massive amounts of data. ESnet provides a scalable and efficient network infrastructure that enables scientists to optimize their resources and conduct ambitious, world-class research.
ESnet's nationwide backbone connects scientists across the U.S. and around the globe. (Select image to enlarge or to download the full-size ESnet network map. More map versions available here,)
The national laboratory system, created over a half-century ago, represents the most comprehensive research system of its kind in the world. National laboratories perform research that is not well suited to universities or the private sector because of its scope, infrastructure, or multidisciplinary nature but for which there is a strong public and national purpose. This is why ESnet exists – to provide the specialized kind of networking services required by multidisciplinary teams of scientists as they collaborate in distributed experiments using world-class scientific equipment, supercomputers, and facilities.
