The Pacific Research Platform

The PRP is a partnership of more than 50 institutions, led by researchers at UC San Diego and UC Berkeley and includes the National Science Foundation, Department of Energy, and multiple research universities in the US and around the world. The PRP builds on the optical backbone of Pacific Wave, a joint project of CENIC and the Pacific Northwest GigaPOP (PNWGP) to create a seamless research platform that encourages collaboration on a broad range of data-intensive fields and projects.

The Pacific Research Platform (PRP) aims to achieve transparent and rapid data access among collaborating scientists at multiple institutions through an integrated implementation of data-focused networking that extends the university campus Science DMZ model to a regional, national, and, eventually, a global scale. PRP researchers are routinely achieving high-performance end-to-end networking from their labs to their collaborators’ labs and data centers, traversing multiple, heterogeneous Science DMZs and wide-area networks connecting multiple campus gateways, enabling researchers across the partnership to transfer data over dedicated optical lightpaths at speeds from 10Gb/s to 100Gb/s.