November, 2008 — Vanderbilt began routing Internet2 and Internet 1 traffic onto a new 10 Gbps circuit. This new circuit increases available research bandwidth by 15 times the previous capacity! Vanderbilt's new 10 Gbps circuit to Atlanta, activated Dec. 1, increases Internet2 research bandwidth from 622 megabits per second to 9 gigabits per second. The other 10 percent (1 gigabit per second) is allocated to Vanderbilt's primary commodity-based Internet connection.

The research bandwidth is available to anyone communicating with an institution via research networks such as Internet2 and the National LambdaRail (NLR), and it enables such scientific research as that being done by the Vanderbilt Department of Physics & Astronomy. Nuclear physicist Dr. Charles Maguire recently secured Vanderbilt's role as the U.S. data repository and principal data analysis site (Tier 2) for the Compact Muon Solenoid-Heavy Ion (CMS-H1) experiments conducted on the large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland. When experimentation there is ongoing for 4-6 weeks each Fall, Vanderbilt will receive near real-time flows of data from the collider experiments.