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17 September 2003
LambdaRail promise
Unique new national networking infrastructure
National LambdaRail, Inc. Puts Promise of Experimental Network
Infrastructure in Hands of Nation's Scientists and Researchers
WASHINGTON, D.C. - September 16, 2003 - National LambdaRail, Inc. (NLR),
a consortium of leading U.S. research universities and private sector
technology companies, today announced it is deploying a new and unique
national networking infrastructure to foster the concurrent 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.
"National LambdaRail is an important development by the community. It
will contribute to the cyberinfrastructure that is critical to progress
in every field of science and engineering," said Peter Freeman,
Assistant Director for the Computer and Information Science and
Engineering Directorate of the National Science Foundation. "We are
very pleased because this can lead to significantly expanded access for
many researchers and educators to computational, analytical and
visualization tools, as well as large data repositories. This will help
create new scientific opportunities across the frontier."
NLR is probably the most ambitious research and education networking
initiative since the ARPANET and the NSFnet, both of which led to the
commercialization of the Internet. In the spirit of these great success
stories, NLR strives to again stimulate and support innovative network
research to go above and beyond the current incremental evolution of the
Internet. The results of such endeavors are expected to facilitate
further commercial development and creation of new technologies and
markets, thereby stimulating economic development and contributing to
U.S. national competitiveness.
The new infrastructure provides a wide range of facilities, capabilities
and services in support of both application level and networking level
experiments. NLR serves a diverse set of communities including
computational scientists, distributed systems researchers and networking
researchers. An explicit goal of NLR is to bring these communities
closer together to solve complex architectural and end-to-end network
scaling challenges. The unprecedented richness and flexibility of this
unique optical and IP infrastructure, combined with robust technical
support services, allow 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.
"Integral to NLR is each member's commitment to further improve
end-to-end network performance by providing dedicated optical
capabilities from campus research labs to integrate seamlessly with
NLR," said Tracy Futhey, Chair of NLR Board of Directors and Vice
President of Information Technology and Chief Information Officer at
Duke University. "We will work closely with the growing set of regional
and enterprise optical networking initiatives to deliver NLR
capabilities to university campuses and into researchers' laboratories.
We hope to spur the development of other such efforts around the
country."
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 re-direct 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, which are widely used in enterprise, institutional and home
networks. This inclusion of Ethernet standards based facilities in NLR
represents a generational shift in the nature, usability and cost of
technologies in backbone networks. NLR is expected to enable a new
generation of pervasive high performance cyber infrastructure for
science and research which will eventually migrate to enterprise and
industry use.
Critical to this unique effort is the participation of Cisco Systems,
Inc. As the key provider of equipment to NLR and a proponent of its
research objectives, Cisco technologies, including optical DWDM
multiplexers, Ethernet switches and IP routers are being used for
deployment of the infrastructure.
"National LambdaRail is a unique concept for advanced networking
research," said Mario Mazzola, Chief Development Officer for Cisco
Systems. "It is not only a unique network infrastructure and tool, but
it is also a virtual laboratory for its partners and will concurrently
support innovative research at all layers of the network, as well as
next generation applications. As such, it will be a useful tool in
developing new capabilities for future critical and cyber
infrastructures."
NLR is currently seeking additional complementary corporate
participation as well as collaboration with federal research agencies in
support of their sponsored research projects to achieve a broad impact
within the research and education community.
Current NLR members and associates include:
+ Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California, CENIC
(http://www.cenic.org)
+ Pacific Northwest GigaPop, PNWGP (http://www.pnw-gigapop.net)
+ Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (http://www.psc.edu) Duke University
+ (http://www.duke.edu), representing a coalition of North
Carolina Universities
+ Mid-Atlantic Terascale Partnership, MATP and the Virginia Tech
+ Foundation
(http://www.midatlantic-terascale.org)
+ Cisco Systems (http://www.cisco.com)
+ Internet2(R) (http://www.internet2.edu)
+ Florida LambdaRail, LLC (http://www.flrnet.org)
+ Georgia Institute of Technology (http://www.gatech.edu)
+ Committee on Institutional Cooperation, CIC (http://www.cic.uiuc.edu)
Pending NLR members include:
+ Texas Universities Consortium
- # #
About National LambdaRail
National LambdaRail, Inc. (NLR) is a major initiative of U.S. research
universities and private sector technology companies to provide a
national scale infrastructure for research and experimentation in
networking technologies and applications. NLR puts the control, the
power and the promise of experimental network infrastructure in the
hands of our nation's scientists and researchers. Visit
http://www.nationallambdarail.org for more information.
Contact:
Tom West
NLR, Inc.
+1-562-346-2280
twest@nationallambdarail.org
For more information on this item please visit the CANARIE CA*net 4
Optical
Internet program web site at
http://www.canarie.ca/canet4/library/list.html
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