IU takes lead on network collaboration to connect the Asia Pacific Oceania region: IT News : Indiana University

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. — International Networks at Indiana University is leading a new research and education network initiative to connect East Asia, Southeast Asia, Oceania, and North America.

The Asia Pacific Oceania Network, or APOnet, brings together 11 global leading-edge research and education networks in North America, East Asia, Southeast Asia, and Oceania to improve high-speed network services in the Asia Pacific Oceania region. 

Dr. Jennifer Schopf, IU’s director of International Networks, is lead coordinator of APOnet.

“For more than 20 years, Indiana University has been committed to supporting research between the United States and partners in the Asia-Pacific region through our TransPAC initiative,” said Schopf. “The new Asia Pacific Oceania network builds on our decades of experience in this realm, and I’m confident it will enable even more multidisciplinary discoveries as teams of experts will be able to collaborate and share data and scientific instruments across national boundaries. We at IU are thrilled to get started on the important work of APOnet, and to see where our new, formalized partnership leads—and how it will benefit humankind.”  

International signing ceremony

The Asia Pacific Oceania network (APOnet) collaboration will connect East Asia, Southeast Asia, Oceania, and North America. The networks and organizations involved are: 

• Australia’s Academic and Research Network (AARNet), 
• Arterial Research and Educational Network in Asia-Pacific (ARENA-PAC),
• University Corporation for Advanced Internet Development d/b/a (Internet2), 
• Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information (KISTI), 
• National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT),
• National Institute of Informatics (NII), 
• Pacific Wave International Exchange, 
• Research and Education Advanced Network New Zealand (REANNZ), 
• Singapore Advanced Research and Education Network (SingAREN),
• TransPAC, and 
• University of Hawaii (UH).

These 11 research and education networks and organizations support important multidisciplinary discoveries made by teams of experts spread around the world, collaborating and sharing data and scientific instruments across national boundaries. Explosive growth in the resolution of sensors and scientific instruments, very high-resolution imagery and video, coupled with global scale instruments, has led to unprecedented volumes of experimental data. 

This APOnet collaboration enables large-scale scientific workflows to accelerate discovery in all areas of science and engineering, including high-energy physics, earth sciences, astronomy and astrophysics, biology and biomedical engineering, as well as scalable visualization, virtual reality, machine learning (ML), and artificial intelligence (AI). Many projects, like the Korea Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research (KSTAR), Square Kilometer Array (SKA), International Rice Research Institute, Mekong Water Initiative, and International Supercomputing Conference, feed increasing amounts of data to collaborating scientists served by the APOnet networks.

To support these multinational collaborations and associated data requirements, all 11 global research and education networks will contribute resources that together can be managed to create a high-speed trans-oceanic network services delivery system that is more resilient, flexible, and consistent than any individual network on its own. The intent is to elevate the services available for research and education across all of the collaborating networks. 

The scope of this collaboration includes enabling multiple paths between R&E networks, providing backup connectivity in case of network outages, coordinating engineering and management activities, cooperating on deployment of emerging network technologies and services, experimenting with and developing applications that serve high-bandwidth demands, supporting shared routing practices, and sharing of measurement data. 

Read the complete news release and partner quotes >>

​About TransPAC

TransPAC, part of the International Networks at Indiana University (IN@IU) portfolio, is a U.S.A. National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded collaboration that supports high-speed networks and their use for collaborative data sharing in science and research. In addition to supporting trans-oceanic high-speed circuits, IN@IU supports direct work with end-users to improve their data transfers, international networking testbeds, and the use of advanced network technologies.