AS10680 IU-RESEARCH

IU-RESEARCH is Indiana University's research-dedicated autonomous system, distinct from the university's general campus network. It is a small, purpose-built AS: RIS sees 5 announced IPv4 prefixes covering roughly 10,240 addresses, plus a single IPv6 prefix.

What it's used for

The routing evidence points squarely at science networking rather than campus IT. The announced space sits in 149.165.0.0/16, and sampled reverse DNS resolves into iu.edu hosts alongside names under jetstream-cloud.org — Jetstream, the NSF-funded research cloud that Indiana University operates for the national academic community. Names such as iut2-... are consistent with the ATLAS Midwest Tier-2 grid computing presence IU hosts. This is a network carrying research compute, data movement, and cloud workloads for scientists, not dormitory or office traffic.

Notable

RIS observes only a single BGP neighbour for this AS. That is the signature of a stub network hanging off one upstream — here, almost certainly Indiana University's own primary AS and the regional/national research backbone behind it — and it firmly rules out any transit or wholesale role despite the university's substantial size. The AS exists to give research traffic its own routing identity and policy, a common pattern for Science DMZ deployments that need to bypass the enterprise firewall path.

Interesting

Indiana University has long been unusually deep in national research networking infrastructure, operating network operations centers and major NSF cyberinfrastructure. A separate ASN for the research arm is a deliberate architectural choice, not an accident of history.