NASA Research and Engineering Network

The NASA Research and Engineering Network (NREN) is a nationwide wide area network which connects selected NASA centers and peers with other high-performance network test-beds. It enables NASA scientists, engineers, and researchers to reach their partners within other federal agencies and academia.

The Columbia Supercomputer at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing Facility.

The NREN ^[1] was initially developed in 1996 enabling:

• Aerospace engineers to revolutionize air travel by remotely controlling wind tunnels on their desktops,
• astronauts and engineers to train together in realistic simulations of space flight,
• medical researchers to safely monitor and treat humans in space from the Earth,
• Earth scientists from all over the country to develop climate models that allow us to predict and respond to environmental events such as floods, and
• space scientists to chart the evolution of the universe.

NASA led the creation of the Next Generation Internet - as the lead organizer of the NGI Implementation Plan ^[2] NREN pioneered three initial NGI Exchanges (NGIXs) with its interagency partners.

NREN interconnected to the Next Generation Internet at the "NGI eXchanges" --NGIXs-- to expand research community participation and address networking scaling.

Since its creation NREN has been upgraded several times. It currently has 10 Gigabits-per-second (Gbit/s) connectivity across the continental United States, primarily to link to the Columbia supercomputer at the NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California.^[3]

In March 2006, NREN developed and implemented a custom wireless networking protocol known as Dynamic Source Routing (DSR). DSR was to be used by field teams and robots to facilitate communication in difficult field conditions.^[4]

In September 2006 the NREN was used to develop a high transfer rate application called BBFTP to support GOES 5 operations between Ames and Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC). BBFTP achieved transfer rates as high as 52 Megabytes/sec, and a net transfer of well over 4 terabytes worth of data.^[4]

The NREN supported operations of the McGill High Arctic Research Station (MARS).^[5]

See also

• Defense Research and Engineering Network