about pacific northwest gigapop

Expert Technical Design

The PNWGP is a state of the art facility for delivering advanced Internet services and applications. This includes providing connectivity to next generation, high-performance national networks such as National LambdaRail and Internet2/Abilene, as well as federal mission networks such as DREN and ESNet. It was the first Gigapop in the country to offer OC-48 (2.4Gbps) packet-over-sonet (POS) services to partners.

The PNWGP presently has high performance research network connections as follows:

• an OC-192 connection to the Abilene Internet2 backbone (upgrade from OC-48 pending)
• an OC-3 connection to the federal DREN network
• an OC-48 connection to the DARPA HSCC research backbone.

In addition, there are multiple, vendor-diverse GbE connections to the commodity Internet. Equipment, circuits, and monitoring capabilities are distributed between a large downtown carrier hotel and the University of Washington's regional networking and computing support facility on the Seattle campus with UW-owned and operated fiber connecting the two facilities.

The foundation of the PNWGP infrastructure is a set of Gigabit Ethernet switches (two each at the carrier hotel and University of Washington sites). These comprise the redundant switched core of the PNWGP. Around this core, routers are attached in either the Gigapop autonomous system (AS 101) or those of collaborating networks collocated downtown (e.g., PNNL). A key advantage of this architecture is that the PNWGP network engineers manage the central switches and can reconfigure or upgrade them with minimum impact on partners and without requiring reconfiguration by external service providers. Additional switching capacity can be added as needed. The Gigapop routers are capable of link speeds up to 10Gbps, and a variety of Ethernet connections are available for partners with access to fiber into a Gigapop location.

The PNWGP currently provides local access in three cities: Seattle, Washington (two sites); Portland, Oregon; and Fairbanks, Alaska. The Portland and Fairbanks sites are connected to the Seattle facility via OC-3 protected POS links. Equipment at all four Gigapop locations is powered by UPS or DC power with backup generators.