NASA Research and Engineering Network

It enables NASA scientists, engineers, and researchers to reach their partners within other federal agencies and academia.

The NREN [1] was initially developed in 1996 enabling: NASA led the creation of the Next Generation Internet - as the lead organizer of the NGI Implementation Plan [2] NREN pioneered three initial NGI Exchanges (NGIXs) with its interagency partners.

It currently has 10 Gigabits-per-second (Gbit/s) connectivity across the continental United States, primarily to link to the Columbia supercomputer at the NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California.

[3] In March 2006, NREN developed and implemented a custom wireless networking protocol known as Dynamic Source Routing (DSR).

[4] In September 2006 the NREN was used to develop a high transfer rate application called BBFTP to support GOES 5 operations between Ames and Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC).

The Columbia Supercomputer at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing Facility.
NREN interconnected to the Next Generation Internet at the "NGI eXchanges" --NGIXs-- to expand research community participation and address networking scaling.