Advancing research networks since 1985
A non-profit cooperative of 380 institutions running its own optical backbone, a distributed compute fabric and a federated identity layer — so that distant machines behave like nearby ones.
JVNC is a cooperative, not a carrier. The members own the fabric, set the policy and read the same measurements the engineers do.
We began in 1985 as the John von Neumann Computing Network, linking a handful of university sites over a single shared backbone. Four decades later the fabric is optical, the scheduler is topology-aware and the members are spread across five continents — but the operating principle has not moved: predictability beats peak numbers.
Every lambda we light, every probe we deploy and every allocation we grant is documented in public. If a route degrades, members see it before they open a ticket.
The cooperative is governed by a council drawn from member institutions, with engineering held to published service objectives rather than commercial ones.
We are not selling bandwidth. We are selling predictability.
Six layers of infrastructure, operated as one system.
Optical Backbone Transit
Coherent 400G ZR+ lambdas on leased dark fibre, reconfigurable in under ninety seconds through a software-defined ROADM layer.
Supercomputing Fabric
Shared GPU partitions, large-memory nodes and a scheduler that understands topology, so jobs land close to their data.
Data Movement & Caching
Edge caches inside member campuses, namespace policies that separate checkpoints from archives, no per-gigabyte charge.
Research Identity Federation
Hardware-backed assurance levels, attribute-based authorisation, temporary rights across institutions without new credentials.
Anycast DNS & Naming
Eleven points of presence, DNSSEC validation everywhere, free secondary service for member authoritative zones.
Observability & Telemetry
Hardware timestamping probes on every hop, one-way delay measurement, raw data published to members.
Eleven points of presence. One flat address plan. No hidden queues.
Dispatches from the cooperative.
Engineering notes, allocation calls and field data — published as they happen, archived in full.