Although officially formed in 1986, ESnet’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. ;xNLx;;xNLx;The center was soon renamed the National Magnetic Fusion Energy Computer Center and the network was known as MFEnet. By 1977, MFEnet connected users in 13 states with the center. ;xNLx;;xNLx;Since those days, the network now known as ESnet has marked many milestones and is today one of the world’s premier networks supporting science research around the globe. In its decades of operation, ESnet has also developed and deployed a number of tools and technologies to advance the state of networking and become a leading contributor to the international networking community.
To allow fusion researchers at the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab in New Jersey to access the Magnetic Fusion Energy Computer Center in California, MFEnet is created -- the forerunner of ESnet.
American Satellite Corp. is selected by MFEnet to replace unreliable landlines used by researchers to connect with NERSC (then called NMFECC). The new satellite links go on line in 1981, providing connections to the computing center.
MFEnet now allows log on from any terminal to any NMFECC main computer.
MIT is among three sites added to the center network. Universities accounted for 27 percent of NMFECC’s computing resource users. The major users — Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore and Oak Ridge national laboratories, General Atomics and Princeton Plasma Physics Lab — used 64 percent of the resources, with the remainder going to other labs.
MFEnet connects 3,000 users to the center’s computers and file systems, courtesy of two large satellite dishes outside the facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
Direct links for moving data are established with the Japanese Plasma Physics Institute in Nagoya.
By 1985, MFEnet serves 138 sites with network traffic averaging more than 300 million characters of data per day.
Dr. Alvin Trivelpiece, head of DOE’s Office of Energy Research, recommends MFEnet be combined with HEPnet, a network supporting High Energy Physics research, to become ESnet.
A formal proposal for creating the Energy Sciences Network is approved and ESnet is released. Responsibility for operating the new network is assigned to NMEFCC. Jim Leighton is named head of ESnet.
A two-day workshop at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory focuses on “The Future of Intersite Networking,” including the role of commercial networks and consolidating existing networks.
In his annual review of network activities, ESnet head Jim Leighton notes that there are ongoing discussions of intra-agency networking, inter-agency networking and international networking, but not interplanetary networking. “To date, we have not received any responses from beings on other planets, but interest remains high.”
Dual satellite links connect General Atomics, and Los Alamos, Argonne and Oak Ridge national labs at 56Kbps speeds, while connectivity to the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab is upgraded to 112Kbps.
The ESnet Steering Committee publishes a 250-page ESnet Program plan outlining the computer networking requirements for all of the Office of Energy Research programs.
ESnet officially begins providing networking services in January 1988.
ESnet head Jim Leighton outlines the network’s schedule for the first two years in an overview printed in the “Buffer” newsletter.
In March, Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory hosts a three-day workshop on Energy Research Network Management to examine future networking needs. The report is published in June.
ESnet completes the installation of an interim 56 Kbps network linking seven U.S. sites, with a plan to move to a 1.5 Mbps trunk. A 64 Kbps satellite link connects the network to CERN in Switzerland.
The newly created ESnet Steering Committee asks the network staff to look into networking with sites outside the U.S., including facilities in England, Germany, France, Italy, Austria, Switzerland and Japan.
In the monthly “Buffer” newsletter for the NMFECC community, ESnet head Jim Leighton discusses “Some new directions for ESnet,” including a decision to move faster in deploying higher-speed commercial routers.
ESnet announces the creation of a new Network Information and Services Group led by Bob Aiken to help the research community make more effective use of the network.
ESnet deploys commercially supplied multiprotocol routers via T1 lines, which provide speeds of 1.5 Mbps using Cisco AGS routers.
The World Wide Web, proposed in 1989, began to popularize the Internet. The next year, ARPANET, the world's first internet, shuts down.
ESnet's new T1 links (which provide speeds of 1.5 Mbps) are 25 times faster than MFEnet’s 56 Kbps lines. (View 1990 ESnet map at left.)
Long symbols for ESnet's forerunner MFEnet and NERSC, two 10-meter satellite dishes were dismantled after a decade of dependable service.
Plans are made to increase bandwidth, gradually extending the faster links to all sites. Six sites will initially be connected by T3 lines at 45 Mbps.
ESnet upgrades to Cisco AGS+ routers. The routers used engineers a Cisco-designed high-speed data bus and packet switching engine. Cbus (short for "Cisco bus") was a 32-bit bus operating at 16.67 MHz, giving a total bandwidth of 533 Mbps.
First T3 links go into production, delivering 45 Mbps, and routers are upgraded to Cisco 7000s, which allow hot insertion and removal for continuous system operation.
ESnet publishes a brochure explaining the various services offered by the network. (1994 Services brochure.pdf)
An overview brochure notes that ESnet is intended to facilitate remote collaboration by researchers and to support needed information access and dissemination among scientific collaborators.
ESnet signs a multi-year agreement with Sprint to provide high-speed Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) communications as part of a federal initiative to develop the “Next Generation Internet.”
The second ESnet Program Plan is published. In his transmission letter, ESnet Steering Committee Chairman Sandy Merola writes “I know of no other program within the Federal government that is so dedicated to and comprehensive in its representation of programs, sites and scientists.”
Over the course of the year, ESnet accommodates a 100 percent increase in traffic, from 4.5 billion to 9 billion packets.
After testing with four sites, ESnet puts the first production traffic into operation using the new ATM data communication services through an agreement with Sprint. This will deliver up to 622 Mbps.
With the growing role of ESnet and the Internet in research and other fields, NERSC provides its users with an article answering questions like "What is the World Wide Web?" and "What is the Internet?"
ESnet was an early partner in researching IPv6, the next generation Internet Protocol developed to provide more Internet addresses. ESnet was also a participant in the 6bone IPv6 testbed project, and provided overall management for the 6bone until the 6bone was decommissioned.
ESnet and NERSC move to Berkeley Lab. Although the network had been part of the NERSC supercomputing center at LLNL, ESnet becomes a standalone department at Berkeley Lab. View the ESnet brochure created for the new program.
Shortly after the move to Berkeley Lab in 1996, ESnet produced a series of videos to explain aspects of the network's role in science, such as combining the power of scientific facilities through network connections.
Shortly after the move to Berkeley Lab in 1996, ESnet produced a series of videos to explain aspects of the network's role in scientific discovery, including this one about some of the first efforts to control experiments remotely over the network.
Shortly after the move to Berkeley Lab in 1996, ESnet produced a series of videos to explain aspects of the network's role in science, including distributed computing.
In 1996, ESnet staff were on the cutting edge of remote work. A regional work center experiment saved some employees the 38 mile commute to Berkeley and allowed them to work flexible hours. The video confidently predicts that someday people might do the same from even further away, like out-of-state!
ESnet maps out its strategy for supporting DOE research and “positioning itself to meet the challenges of integrating the DOE’s facilities, information, and expertise into a more effective and responsive enterprise.”
Enter story info here
ESnet publishes its third program plan, which includes a summary of research programs served by ESnet and outline’s each program’s present and future networking needs.
In a “Quality of Service” demonstration led by ESnet, scientists at Lawrence Berkeley and Argonne national laboratories successfully mark selected Internet traffic for priority service over unmarked, lower-priority traffic in a cross-country demonstration, paving the way for more reliable and constant connectivity via priority bandwidth. In a test sharing an intentionally congested path, the priority-marked stream moved at eight frames per second, while the standard version transmitted just one frame per second.
At the 7th IEEE Symposium on High Performance Distributed Computing, LBL’s Bill Johnston gives a presentation on “High-Speed, Wide Area, Data Intensive Computing: A Ten Year Retrospective.”
ESnet requests and is assigned the very first production IPv6 addressing prefix by the American Registry for Internet Numbers and uses it to provide IPv6 services to users.
ESnet announces that it has awarded a $50 million contract to Qwest Communications International Inc. to support ESnet for up to seven years. Under the contract, Qwest will provide performance levels up to a terabit network by the year 2005, offering 500 times the highest speed then available in the industry.
ESnet issues a 118-page program plan looking at current and future networking requirements to support research across the DOE Office of Science.
Transition from Sprint to Qwest as ESnet’s network provider. Equipment includes Juniper M20 and Cisco 8540 & 7500 routers.
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