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DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION
FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY /
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Breaking News -
Networking:
Qwest Provides High-Speed Network
For Illinois Institutions
Qwest Communications International Inc announced that Argonne National
Laboratory, one of the U.S. Department of Energy's largest research centers,
has deployed Qwest's broadband fiber optic network for the Illinois
Wired/Wireless Infrastructure for Research and Education (I-WIRE) project. The
I-WIRE project provides ultra-high-speed interconnection to major research
institutions and universities in Illinois.
Under the contract, Qwest provides backbone capacity, site construction,
engineering services and dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM)
equipment, which is designed to maximize the capacity of each fiber strand.
The I-WIRE project, run out of Argonne, located 25 miles southwest of Chicago,
connects eight campuses -- Argonne National Laboratory, Fermi National
Accelerator Laboratory, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign/NCSA,
University of Illinois-Chicago, Northwestern University Chicago Campus,
Illinois Institute of Technology, the University of Chicago and STARLIGHT in
Chicago.
"I-WIRE is just one more example of Qwest's commitment to the
supercomputing
efforts of our government and educational research institutions," said James
F.X. Payne, senior vice president of Qwest's government services division.
"I-WIRE set the pace for others to follow in taking control of their network
destiny by owning their own metro fiber and managing their own equipment."
The advanced optical network will accelerate research in collaborative and
virtual environments. Through this network, people can work, study and create
together as if they are in the same physical location. It will enable
evaluation of advanced optical network architectures and technologies,
providing a testing facility for next-generation ideas and applications.
One example of I-WIRE's application is its use in the TeraGrid, a National
Science Foundation project to build the world's largest distributed terescale
infrastructure for open science research. I-WIRE is providing critical
connectivity between computational resources at Argonne and the University of
Illinois with a capacity that is three times that of the current national
backbone.
"Qwest's long, successful history of providing services for numerous
research
facilities throughout the country was a major impetus in our vendor selection
process," said Linda Winkler of Argonne National Lab. "The solutions provided
by Qwest enabled I-WIRE to build a flexible, high-performance information
infrastructure to meet the demanding requirements of the research and
education community for network capacity."
Other Qwest GSD federal scientific and R&D networks include:
- ESnet, a high bandwidth network that links the nation's top scientists,
researchers and educators with the Department of Energy's unparalleled
research facilities.
- Abilene, an Internet2 backbone that connects more than 202 universities
and
research institutions worldwide.
- NREN (NASA's Research and Engineering Network), a network that provides
direct broadband local access and comprehensive network operations
support.
- TeraGrid (Distributed Terascale Facility project), an ultra-high-speed
network that builds on the other research projects, including the Global Grid
Forum, which envisions a platform for worldwide shared computing
resources.
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