The distributed network environment research program in the Office of Advanced Scientific Computing conducts research and development activities to support distributed high-end science in the Office of science.  It focuses on end-to-end of high-performance, high-capacity and middleware network technologies necessary to provide secure access to distributed science facilities, high-performance computing recourses and large-scale scientific collaborations.

The Goal of the program is to research, develop, test and deploy advanced network technologies critical in addressing networking capabilities unique to DOE’s science mission.  The program’s portfolio consists of two main elements:

• High-Performance Networks -  Research and develop-ment of advanced technologies which include tech-nologies for rapid provisioning of hybrid packet/circuit-switched networks, ultra high-speed transport protocols, high-speed data distribution tools and services, secure and scalable technologies for bandwidth and circuits  reservation and scheduling, secure and scalable tools and services for  monitoring and managing of federated networks.

• High-Performance Middleware – research and dev-elopment to support distributed high-end science applications and related distributed scientific research activities. These include advanced middleware to enable large-scale scientific collaborations; Secure and scalable software stacks to manage and distribute massive science data, software and services to seamlessly integrated science workflows to experiments and network infrastructures; cyber security systems and services to enable large-scale national and international scientific collaborations.

The program addresses these technical challenges with a combination of short-term horizon and long-term horizon research and development activities.  The short-term horizon activities focus primarily applied research which includes the use of network testbeds to extend, deploy, and test advanced network concepts that have been validated with basic research but not commercially available. These activities are generally accompanied by the development of transition strategies to move the resulting technology into production science networks.  The focus of the long-term horizon activities is on basic research that addresses the fundamental issues of ultra high-capacity networks and large-scale distributed scientific collaboration.