AS8970 WASK WROCMAN-EDU educational part of WASK network, Wroclaw, Poland

WASK is the Wrocławska Akademicka Sieć Komputerowa (Wrocław Academic Computer Network), operated by the Wrocław Centre of Networking and Supercomputing (WCSS) at Wrocław University of Science and Technology. The RIR handle spells out the educational role directly: "educational part of WASK network, Wroclaw, Poland".

What it's used for

• The metropolitan academic network for Wrocław: universities, research institutes, libraries and other public research bodies in the city, plus WCSS's own supercomputing and grid services.
• It announces a single legacy 156.17.0.0/16 — 65,536 addresses — and one IPv6 /32. The rDNS is unambiguously academic: lynx.wcss.wroc.pl and kwazar.wcss.wroc.pl for the computing centre, and departmental hosts such as alpha.ch.pwr.wroc.pl and biote.ch.pwr.wroc.pl in the university's chemistry faculty.

Notable

• The whole allocation is one contiguous /16 held by a single institution. That is the classic shape of an early academic allocation, and it is what makes this an education network rather than a regional ISP, despite serving many separate organisations.
• WCSS is one of Poland's national supercomputing centres and a node of the PIONIER national research and education network, so this AS is both a campus network and a piece of national research infrastructure.

Interesting

• Hostnames like lynx, kwazar and spite are the naming style of a computing centre that has been running machines since long before cloud instance IDs — the /16 and the AS number are the same vintage.