Greg Bell, head of ESnet and director of Berkeley Lab’s Scientific Networking Division, will give the closing keynote address on Thursday, Sept. 20, at the 2012 NORDUnet conference in Oslo, Norway. NORDUnet is a joint collaboration by the five Nordic national research and education networks in Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden. ESnet has collaborated with NORDUnet on common methodologies for reserving end-to-end bandwidth to accelerate large data transfers, and on standards development for the emerging Network Service Interface protocol.  

In his talk, “Network as Instrument: the View from Berkeley,” Bell will argue that “it’s time to start thinking about research networks as instruments for discovery, not as infrastructures for service-delivery.”  He will explain what’s at stake in this distinction, and “how ESnet’s strategy is influenced by its unusual institutional context: embedded in a US national laboratory, classified as a user facility, and located uphill from a famously audacious university.”