Singapore’s SingAREN Leverages Ciena’s Optical Technology to Support AI and More
Drives Scientific Advancements That Can Potentially Address Societal Challenges and Enhance Our Well-Being
For over a decade, Singapore has consistently ranked highly on the Global Innovation Index, an annual ranking of 130 economies. In 2024 it achieved its highest position yet—fourth globally. This strong performance is largely due to steady, long-term investment in research & development (R&D) as a key pillar of Singapore’s economic development strategy. Supporting Singapore’s Research, Innovation and Enterprise (RIE) ecosystem is the Singapore Advanced Research and Education Network (SingAREN), which was established in 1997.
SingAREN is the sole provider of dedicated local and international network services for the local Research and Education community. Its network supports the SingAREN Open Exchange (SOE) for high-speed research and education connectivity, eduroam, an international Wi-Fi internet access roaming service for the international research and education community, and FileSender SG as a platform for large file transfers, among other services running on its network.
SingAREN Driving Singapore’s RIE Agenda
RIE is vital to Singapore’s progress, fostering economic growth and competitiveness. It also drives scientific advancements that can potentially address societal challenges and enhance our well-being.
“Our backbone network, powered by Ciena’s 6500 optical solution, is built to handle the growing demands of Artificial Intelligence (AI), genomics, and big data applications—transmitting petabytes of data. To support the advancement of Singapore’s RIE agenda, our flexible, low-latency network can now seamlessly deliver 10G to 100G connections to member institutions. We continue to push the boundaries of research and innovation, ensuring connectivity is never a limiting factor,” said Associate Professor Francis Lee, Vice President of SingAREN.
SingAREN has supported robotic telesurgery trials across international boundaries, which require precise, instantaneous control, and a low-latency network for real-time collaboration.
SingAREN also enables high-speed, resilient connectivity to the National Supercomputing Centre (NSCC), which manages Singapore’s national high-performance computing (HPC) resources, supporting research and innovation across various fields. In particular, the NSCC’s expertise and specialised infrastructure are often leveraged to manage and analyse genomic data. Transferring genomic data is typically difficult due to its massive data size.
SingAREN provided a high-speed link to the Cancer Science Institute of Singapore for a research project, transmitting more than two petabytes of cancer genomics data downloaded from repositories in the United States into NSCC. The research involved harmonising petabytes of whole genome sequencing data, and downloads were expected to be extremely fast, stable, and efficient, after which, the downloaded data would be analysed and reprocessed with high computing power.
This is but one of the examples of collaboration with NSCC to transfer, download, analyse, and process genomic data.
Focusing on Research Needs in an AI Era
Academic research is experiencing explosive growth and requires more data than ever before, fuelled by AI and Machine Learning (ML), and cloud computing. The increasing use of generative and agentic AI will also impact SingAREN and its research partners significantly, leading to increased data volume. This type of advanced research activity will not be possible without a robust, scalable, low-latency network.
In the coming months, SingAREN will enhance its network to further support its research institution partners. These plans include the SingAREN Lightwave Internet Exchange (SLIX) 2.5 project, to provide high-speed, secure connectivity by 2027, and the SLIX 3.0 vision to build a future-ready network that incorporates quantum-safe networking, AI research, and haptic surgery. SingAREN also aims to expand cybersecurity threat intelligence sharing and continue infrastructure upgrades, such as implementing 400G switches and enhancing Points of Presence (PoP) resilience.
Ciena Optical Solutions Leveraged by SingAREN
SingAREN uses Ciena’s 6500 powered by Ciena’s WaveLogic programmable coherent optic technology. Deployed by Ciena partner, Terrabit Networks, Ciena’s 6500 supports SingAREN to respond to changing requirements on-demand, allowing the REN to continually maximise network efficiencies and offer customisable service delivery over any distance.
