Supporting COVID-19 Research: International Networks: Networks 2020 Annual Report: Indiana University

Support for COVID-19 research

International Networks at Indiana University continually works with its partner organizations to identify and fix routing anomalies on international data flows and to improve overall end-to-end network performance for U.S. scientists sharing data around the world. In 2020, IN@IU staff began looking closely at international data flows between institutions and data sources related to COVID-19 research. Using NetSage, the team was able to identify increases in data transfers between bioinformatics, genomics, and other COVID-related science disciplines to determine if these collaborations were realizing effective end-to-end performance.

Darker areas indicate an increase in larger volumes of data transfers between JISC Services Limited, the United Kingdom’s backbone network and identifier for the EBI data center, and MIT’s Partners HealthCare System during the month of January 2020. After a spike in transfers on January 15 to January 16, a more sustained surge occurred between January 19 and 26.

For example, at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, data transfers between the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI), located in Cambridge, UK and Partners Healthcare Systems, part of MIT, increased from less than 1TB total in 2019 to over 50TB in January 2020 alone. In March 2020, IN@IU staff began working with engineers at both institutions to examine traffic routing and to test the end-to-end network path to ensure this data was being transferred as quickly and efficiently as possible. This work by IN@IU helped to significantly increase the transfer performance. Throughout the year, IN@IU worked with its partners to provide high performance networking resources and support to researchers fighting the COVID-19 pandemic.