AS9591 NIFS National Institute for Fusion Science

AS9591 (NIFS) is held by the National Institute for Fusion Science, the Japanese national research institute at Toki in Gifu Prefecture. NIFS is the home of the Large Helical Device (LHD), a superconducting stellarator that has been confining hydrogen and, since 2017, deuterium plasmas as part of Japan's magnetic-confinement fusion programme. This is a single research site's network.

What it's used for

The routing evidence is short and telling: two IPv4 prefixes covering 65,536 addresses, which is the whole of 133.75.0.0/16 plus a more-specific 133.75.232.0/24, no IPv6, and two BGP neighbours. The 133.0.0.0/8 range is long associated with Japanese academic and research institutions, and holding an entire /16 is the mark of an organisation that received its allocation in the era when a national institute was simply given a class-B network. What matters is the contrast: 65,536 addresses against just two peers. This is not a carrier and not a hosting platform. It is a leaf site with an enormous historical allocation and a tiny routing presence, consuming transit through the Japanese research networking arrangements. The space carries what a fusion laboratory needs it to carry: experiment control and diagnostic systems around the LHD, the very large datasets those diagnostics produce, simulation and analysis clusters, and the institute's ordinary web, mail and staff services.

Notable

• The extra /24 announced alongside the /16 is a routine traffic-engineering or dual-homing artefact, not a separate network.
• NIFS runs graduate education in fusion science in partnership with SOKENDAI, so the network serves students and visiting researchers as well as permanent staff.
• The institute collaborates internationally on fusion experiments, which is part of why a research site of its size sustains its own AS rather than sitting inside a university's.