Defense Research and Engineering Network

The Defense Research and Engineering Network (DREN) is the United States Department of Defense’s research and engineering computer network. It is a major component of the DoD High Performance Computing Modernization Program. The DREN is a high-speed, high-capacity, low-latency nation-wide computer network for computational scientific research, engineering, and testing in support of DoD's Science & Technology and Test & Evaluation communities. The DREN connects scientists and engineers at the HPCMP's geographically dispersed High Performance Computing (HPC) user sites, including the four DoD Supercomputing Resource Centers—Army Research Laboratory, Engineer Research and Development Center, Naval Oceanographic Office, Air Force Research Lab^[1]—along with more than 150 distributed centers like other government laboratories, test centers, universities, and industrial locations . The sites connected by DREN services may be at virtually any location in the United States, including Alaska and Hawaii.

The DREN Wide Area Networking (WAN) capability is provided under a commercial contract, currently awarded to Verizon's Business Network Services.^[2] It has been awarded in the past to AT&T and MCI/WorldCom. The DREN WAN service provider has built DREN as a virtual private network based on its commercial infrastructure. It currently supports IPv4 and IPv6 at bandwidths from DS-3 (45 Mbit/s) at some user sites up to Optical Carrier-48c (2.488 Gbit/s) and 10 Gigabit Ethernet LAN drops at selected High Performance Computing Centers.^[2] The DREN provides digital, imaging, video, and audio data transfer services between defined service delivery points (SDPs) categorized by WAN bandwidth access; supported network protocols—Multi Protocol Label Switching, Internet Protocol, or Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM); and local connection interfaces.

Expansions or enhancements to the DREN as a whole are accomplished through the addition of defined service delivery points or modifications to the operating specifications of existing ones.

In 2003, it was designated the Department of Defense's first IPv6 network by the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Networks & Information Integration.

See also

• CANARIE
• DANTE
• Energy Sciences Network
• High Performance Wireless Research and Education Network
• Internet2 Network
• NASA Research and Engineering Network

References

1. ^ Shared Resource Centers, U.S. Naval Research Laboratory.
2. ^ ^{a b} Juniper Networks, Inc. Defense Research and Engineering Network Looks to Juniper Networks to Gain the Benefits of IPv6 and Meet Government Mandates (Case Study), 2008.

• Phillip Dykstra, Chief Scientist, WareOnEarth Communications Inc. DREN Overview, JET Workshop. April 13, 2004.

External links

 This article incorporates public domain material from the United States Government document "High Performance Computing Modernization Program. Department of Defense".

• DRENv6 Information