DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY /    ( Table of Contents )

Breaking News - Networking:

Korea Connects To StarLight Across Canadian Optical Network

A flurry of e-mails between network engineers in North America and South Korea last week unofficially marked the "lighting" of an optical path now transiting Korea's research traffic from Seoul, across Canada to Chicago.

In a special arrangement between Canadian, Korean and U.S. networking project personnel, KREONet2 and KOREN, the national research networks of Korea, now transit traffic from the Pacific Northwest GigaPoP (PNWGP) in Seattle, where Korea's transpacific link lands, to StarLight in Chicago via Canada's optical research network CA*net 4.

KREONet2 and KOREN, two distinct research communities sharing one link, disconnected its 155Mb per second connection to STAR TAP, StarLight's ATM-based predecessor also located in Chicago, on April 30. The networks now peer with a global community of research and education networks at StarLight, a National Science Foundation-funded optical facility that supports 1Gb per second, 2.5Gb per second and 10Gb per second links.

KREONet2 and KOREN join two other leading research networks in Ireland and Taiwan to autonomously cross connect over CA*net 4 using its User Controlled LightPath (UCLP) network management software. UCLP allows end users to create and manage their own optical lightpath without signaling or requiring permission from any central network management authority. Other features allow users to create lambda grid networks optimized for the needs of high-end applications and data flows. UCLP is co-funded by Cisco Canada and CANARIE Inc, Canada's Advanced Internet Development Organization.

"This arrangement affords Korea's research networks, and by extension its scientific community, the flexibility to control and provision data flow at will," said Bill St. Arnaud, senior director of advanced networks for CANARIE Inc. "It permits a much greater ability to innovate in the development of network-based applications."

CA*net 4 is one of a number of international networks in North America and the Pacific Rim that peer at the PNWGP, an international peering facility in Seattle since 1998. Pacific Wave is a joint project of PNWGP and the Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California (CENIC) to create, deploy and operate an advanced, extensible peering facility along the entire U.S. Pacific Coast.

"This international cooperative arrangement in support of research is precisely what the Pacific Wave peering infrastructure aims to facilitate," said Ron Johnson, vice president and vice provost of the University of Washington. University of Washington founded and largely built the PNWGP. It also created and now hosts the Pacific Wave international peering service.

The Korean government supports efforts to foster innovative research in various science and engineering disciplines based on Grids and e-Science. The StarLight connection plays a major role in advancing Korea's research, which relies on high-performance computing and high-speed networks. StarLight's advanced optical infrastructure provides network services optimized for high-performance applications, such as High Voltage Electron Microscopy (HVEM) research at the Korea Basic Science Institute.

The Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information (KISTI) Supercomputing Center is another key institution. "KISTI has a long history of supporting supercomputer users for the advancement of science and technology, and optical networking is a natural extension of this effort," said Jysoo Lee, director of the KISTI Supercomputer Center.

The StarLight connection also enables Korea to actively participate in building the global research infrastructure and further its contributions to innovative science and technology. Korea is joining StarLight's TransLight and Global Lambda Integrated Facility (GLIF) consortia, two initiatives that serve complementary goals in StarLight's community of optical or "lambda" connected networks. TransLight is a partnership of countries, consortia and institutions willing to make lambdas available to the global e-science community for scheduled use. TransLight is the underlying infrastructure for GLIF, a world-scale "virtual" laboratory for application and middleware development, where applications rely on dynamically configured optical wavelength networks.

"KISTI will actively participate in TransLight and GLIF in order to work with this global alliance on the development of the Lambda Grid for e-Science," said Lee.