Connecting science at scale

IRIS provides the powerful distributed digital research infrastructure that enables scientists to collaborate on some of the largest, most data-intensive computing projects in the world.

Its technology, along with its roles as a funding, convening and organising body, powers high profile projects such as large-scale particle physics experiments, the analysis of breathtaking images of space taken by the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile, the Diamond Light Source synchrotron experiments based in Oxfordshire, and many more.

IRIS’s work with UK universities and researchers relies heavily upon our Janet Network, which underpins a vital, federated compute resource for the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), providing the high-capacity, low-latency backbone required to manage and move scientific datasets across more than 20 interlinked sites.

The requirement is not just to move this data but to do so reliably, without loss, with trust and identity measures in place to keep it safe, and to defend against threats including distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks.

For Jon Hays, professor of physics at Queen Mary University of London and science director of the STFC IRIS Federation, Janet’s resilience is its key benefit.

“We are completely reliant on Janet to make all of that work together. When you are spread across more than 20 sites, you need to connect them all, and that’s where Janet is absolutely fundamental to what we do. Without that national backbone, the distributed nature of IRIS simply wouldn’t function in any coherent way.”

– Professor Jon Hays, science director, STFC IRIS Federation

IRIS and Jisc in action: Vera C Rubin Observatory

The IRIS network is directly responsible for hosting the UK data facility for the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, enabling scientists to process the deluge of data generated by the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST). The LSST camera is the largest ever built, and the project hit headlines worldwide in 2025 when its first images revealed the existence of 11,000 previously unknown asteroids – some of them classified as Near-Earth Objects.

UK participation in this groundbreaking project depends on reliable, high-performance international connectivity, provided by Jisc in collaboration with GÉANT. Janet provides the high-capacity links that connect UK nodes in the Rubin data ecosystem, including sites such as RAL at Harwell, Cambridge, Lancaster, and Edinburgh.

Watch the Janet takes UK research to the stars video on YouTube.

IRIS and Jisc in action: Plato

The European Space Agency mission Plato (PLAnetary Transits and Oscillations of stars) will launch a telescope with 26 cameras in 2027 to discover and examine terrestrial exoplanets in orbits up to the habitable zone of Sun-like stars. Plato will also characterise the planets' host stars by studying tiny light variations in the starlight it receives – ultimately increasing our knowledge of potential candidates where conditions might support life.

IRIS is providing thousands of CPUs and several petabytes of storage for the project, which will see data from the telescope transferred across the network and processed at the University of Cambridge.

“Scientists want to focus on the science, and the best sign that any critical infrastructure such as Janet is doing its job is that nobody notices it’s there. Our experience is that it just works.”

– Professor Jon Hays

Support that goes beyond connectivity

As well as connectivity to IRIS and participating institutions, Jisc advises and continuously adapts to the sometimes unpredictable demands of its work now and in the future. This consultative role is important to IRIS, ensuring that capacity is delivered ahead of need and that, if investment in infrastructure is required, it can be secured in good time.

“Jisc plays a really important role in how we work with university IT teams. The network terminates at the institution level, so if that final layer isn’t implemented properly, it doesn’t matter how good everything is upstream. What Jisc can do is come in and advise from a position of authority as the provider of the network, which gives universities confidence that what we’re asking for is the right approach.”

– Professor Jon Hays

IRIS also values the benefits of our eduroam technology which enables secure and seamless “all trusted” wifi access for users on any device they have, wherever they are in the world – vital for smooth collaboration, for example when visiting research centres overseas.

Our long and productive relationship with IRIS is an example of how Janet is optimised to underpin connectivity and data transfer on a global scale, and a textbook example of why Jisc is the partner of choice for research organisations.

“With large-scale projects, a lot of funding tends to go towards compute and storage rather than networks, because it’s assumed the network will just be there. Scientists focus on CPU cores and storage, and less on connectivity. It’s up to us to make that work optimally.”

– Tim Chown, network development manager, Jisc

Next steps

For enquiries about connecting to Janet, get in touch.

If you are an existing Jisc customer who would like more information, you can contact your relationship manager.