The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has turned on an ICANN Managed Root Server (IMRS) cluster in Singapore, marking it the first of such site in Asia-Pacific. The region currently sees the highest volume of queries worldwide, receiving twice as many as Europe.
The new cluster will help boost the root server capacity for this region as well as the overall resiliency of the root server system, said ICANN in a statement Thursday. The organisation's Asia-Pacific office is located in Singapore.
Comprising "dozens of servers with substantial internet connectivity", the Singapore cluster is ICANN's fourth worldwide with two residing in North America and one in Europe, according to the organisation's senior vice president and CTO, David Conrad.
"Our existing, smaller IMRS sites in the Asia-Pacific region already receive twice as many queries as Europe, the next-busiest region. Adding an IMRS cluster in Singapore is both strategic and a good use of ICANN resources," Conrad said.
Established in 1998 under the US[1] Department of Commerce, the ICANN oversees the infrastructure that matches Web addresses to their corresponding IP addresses. It coordinates these identify-and-match tasks, enabling internet users anywhere to locate and access a site via a decipherable Web address, rather than a string of numbers. This means that the DNS (Domain Name System) will translate Web addresses typed into a browser, such as "zdnet.com", into the numerical language that machines use to communicate.
After years of delay[2], ICANN's administrative functions were officially transferred out of US jurisdiction[3] in October 2016, but the non-profit organisation's operations remains bound by Californian laws[4].
Citing its OCTO-008 research paper[5] released in April, ICANN said global DNS traffic climbed nearly 30% during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown.
It said the