ESnet Turns 40: Three Decades of Innovating with ESnet Directors

By Cees de Laat, Professor Emeritus of System & Network Engineering at the University of Amsterdam, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab affiliate, and former ESnet Advisory Board member

To mark our 40th anniversary of accelerating science, ESnet invited our science users, DOE site engineers, research & education collaborators, current and former staff, and other community members to share stories and insights about ESnet.

Share yours here via our virtual guestbook.  

Left to right, top row: ESnet collaborator Cees de Laat in 2003, former ESnet Director Bill Johnston in 2005, and the ESnet6 DOE review committee in 2018. Bottom row: ESnet’s policy board circa 2019, and de Laat with ESnet Executive Director Inder Monga and CTO Chin Guok in 2026.

My earliest ESnet-related memories are attending a talk from Bill Johnston at a CHEP conference in San Francisco in 1994, where Bill talked about experiments with Cisco routers, but my first visit to Berkeley Lab was in March 2003. That was when we were expanding the Lambda Grid, building networks from the bottom up — contrary to ordering expensive services from the telecom industry. A lot of RTT-related protocol work had to be done, and ESnet was leading with their Network Backplane measurement tooling. 

The first photo I took at Berkeley Lab shows that correct spelling of my name was already an issue back then; I used that picture in several presentations as the last slide. So Bill invited me again a year later to give a presentation, and the story I heard was that this time he walked down to the gate himself to check that my name was spelled correctly on the parking pass. From then on, I regularly visited the lab to work together on several aspects of networking and cyber infrastructure, demonstrating the work at SC and Terena, and where appropriate, publishing the results. 

I also invited Bill to present a colloquium at the University of Amsterdam, and I told the reception, "If you see Santa Claus walking in, give me a call." The reaction was ha ha ha, but sure enough an hour later, I got the call. 

After that came the tenure of Steve Cotter as director and the big Obama stimulus funds after the bank crisis. That saw the birth of the ESnet fiber-based network buildup, in which I was also able to play some minor role. Given that protocols and speed are not an issue anymore, ESnet can define its own scaling in that model, so we turned our attention on how to describe the complexity and how to protect resources and data while working together in federated global infrastructures. 

In 2015 I spent the first part of my sabbatical at Berkeley Lab. Together with then-director Greg Bell, I visited several very interesting groups at UC Berkeley and attended colloquia of topics of interest at CITRIS that I would never see back home. These were also the times Berkeley Lab’s Superfacility concept was thought out, discussed, and presented. I was honoured to be invited in Computing Sciences and DOE CDR review committees and even chaired several, which showed me again the passion everyone at ESnet has for innovating, designing, constructing, and building out the new networks and gave me a lot of insight. 

I already knew Inder Monga from the SURFnet-Nortel days. We regularly visited each other and discussed new concepts to be rolled out in the networks and how the boundaries between pure networks and computing and data are fading. The DMZ concept developed by ESnet was an eye opener worldwide, and it opened more doors. 

Now we see the development of leading roles for ESnet in the American Science Cloud platform, which brings us again to the same dynamics we have seen around the turn of the century with respect to the Internet. We are again at the start of many years of revolutionary innovations with the introduction of AI. It is a pleasure to be still working together with ESnet, congratulations!

READ MORE: Feature story: "Four Decades of Accelerating Science: ESnet Turns 40" Brian Tierney on the Beginning of SCinet Memories from our Science Partners  Share your ESnet story or memory Follow #ESnetTurns40 on LinkedIn

JOIN US:  Virtual Celebration Wed. Nov. 4, 10 a.m.-1 p.m. Pacific Time: Invited flash talks; a Directors' Roundtable Q&A with Bill Johnston, Steve Cotter,  Greg Bell, and Inder Monga; and breakout rooms grouped by ESnet era for informal socializing. See schedule and register here. Celebration at SC26 Mon., Nov. 16, 7:30-9 p.m. Central Time: At the DOE Booth at Supercomputing 2026 in Chicago. No RSVP needed.