The next generation DOE large-scale science applications have requirements that will drive extreme networking, in terms of sheer high throughputs as well as dynamically stable connections.  The UltraScience Net is (USN) an experimental research testbed funded by DOE Office of Science to enable the development of hybrid optical networking and associated technologies to meet the unprecedented demands of large-scale science applications.

High Energy Physics collaborations consist of hundreds to thousands of physicists and are world-wide in scope.  Experiments and applications now running, or starting soon, need the data movement capabilities available now only on advanced and/or experimental networks. The Lambda Station project steers selectable traffic through site infrastructure and forwards it onto these "high-impact" wide-area networks.  Lambda Station also controls ingress and egress filters between the site and the high-impact networks and takes responsibility for negotiating with reservation or provisioning systems that regulate the WAN control plane, be it based on SONET channels, demand tunnels or dynamic optical links.

The Hybrid Multi-Layer Network Control for Emerging Cyber-Infrastructures (Hybrid-MLN) project is conducting research and development on automated multi-layer inter-networking control plane technologies that enable distributed multi-layer multi-domain routing and provisioning in large-scale, high-performance network infrastructures.

The TeraPaths project investigates the use and integration of Differentiated Services-based LAN QoS and WAN MPLS technologies in data-intensive distributed computing environments, such as the ATLAS computing environment. The goal of the project is to provide the capability of managing the network as a critical resource in the same way as resource schedulers/batch managers manage CPU resources in a multi-user environment.

The focus of the ESnet On-Demand Secure Circuits and Advance Reservation System (OSCARS) is to develop and deploy a prototype service that enables on-demand provisioning of guaranteed bandwidth secure circuits within ESnet.