National LambdaRail Announces Networking Infrastructure

released September 23, 2003

National LambdaRail, Inc. (NLR), a consortium of leading U.S. research universities and private sector technology companies, announced recently that it is deploying a new national networking infrastructure to foster the advancement of networking research and next generation network-based applications in science, engineering and medicine. NLR aims to reenergize innovative research and development into next generation network technologies, protocols, services and applications.

The new infrastructure provides a wide range of facilities, capabilities and services in support of both application-level and networking-level experiments. NLR serves computational scientists, distributed systems researchers and networking researchers. NLR aims to bring these communities closer together to solve complex architectural and end-to-end network scaling challenges. This unique optical and IP infrastructure, combined with robust technical support services, allows multiple concurrent large-scale networking research and application experiments to coexist on the same infrastructure. This will enable network researchers to deploy and control their own dedicated testbeds with full visibility and access to underlying switching and transmission fabric.

For the first time, the research community has acquired a national dark fiber footprint that can concurrently support network research at the optical, switching, routing, middleware, and application layers. NLR is lighting the first fiber pair with an optical Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM) network capable of transmitting up to 40 simultaneous light wavelengths ("lambdas" or "waves") each at 10 gigabits per second (Gbps).

NLR is also deploying a switched Ethernet network and a routed IP network over the optical DWDM network. Combined, these networks enable the allocation of independent, dedicated, deterministic ultra-high performance network services to applications, groups, networked scientific apparatus and instruments, and research projects. The optical waves enable building networking research testbeds at switching and routing layers with ability to redirect real user traffic over them for testing purposes. For optical layer research testbeds additional dark fiber pairs are available on the national footprint.

NLR is the first national scale network to deploy transcontinental "circuits" based upon 10 Gbps Ethernet (LAN PHY) technologies end-to-end.

Current NLR members and associates include:

• Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California
• Pacific Northwest GigaPop
• Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center
• Duke University, representing a coalition of North Carolina Universities
• Mid-Atlantic Terascale Partnership, MATP and the Virginia Tech Foundation
• Cisco Systems
• Internet2
• Florida LambdaRail, LLC
• Georgia Institute of Technology
• Committee on Institutional Cooperation

 

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