The U.S. Dept. of Energy's Office of Science is a major funder of physical science research in the US, and the primary funder in several areas such as high energy physics.
As scientific experiments get larger and more expensive, the size and scope of the associated collaboration communities increases. Supporting the analysis of scientific data from such experiments requires data management and analysis of massive amounts of data making use of compute and storage resources that are distributed in laboratories and universities all over the world. Increasingly such systems are being built using Grid/Web Services style Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) frameworks.
For this to be successful in the highly distributed, data intensive science environment, the service components must have predictable, capable, and reliable communication: That is, the network must become another service element that can by integrated into SOA-like systems. This requires that networks provide new transport and security mechanisms, highly capable monitoring, etc., all of which are available as