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DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION
FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY / SEPTEMBER 22, 2003: VOL. 2 NO. 38
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Special Features:
NEW CLASS OF GRID INFRASTRUCTURE
LAUNCHED TO SUPPORT RESEARCH
National LambdaRail Inc (NLR), a consortium of leading U.S. research
universities and private sector technology companies, 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.
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 Gb per second 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
- Pacific Northwest GigaPop, PNWGP
- 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
Pending NLR members include:
- Texas Universities Consortium
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