NEW CLASS OF NATIONAL NETWORKING INFRASTRUCTURE
LAUNCHED
TO SUPPORT CUTTING-EDGE RESEARCH AND EXPERIMENTATION
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
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
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