News for and about the Internet2 community

[Greg Wood <>]

For immediate release
May 15, 2002
Contact: Lee Tune 301.405.4679 or 


A Partnership of Universities, Federal Agencies and IT Companies Starts 
New Network for Testing of Advanced IT Technologies

College Park, Md.--The Mid-Atlantic Crossroads (MAX) consortium and the 
Naval Research Laboratory announce the launch of the next-generation 
Advanced Technology Demonstration Network (ATDnet), an unclassified 
Department of Defense (DoD) research network. Partnering with Qwest 
Communications, Verizon, and Fibergate, this next generation ATDnet is a 
regional fiber test bed that will support research in emerging and 
experimental telecommunications technologies and applications.

ATDnet is a partnership of multiple federal institutions that include 
the Naval Research Laboratory, the Defense Intelligence Agencys, NASA 
Goddard Space Flight Center, the Laboratory for Telecommunications 
Sciences, the Defense Advanced Research Programs Agency, and the Defense 
Information Systems Agency.

The new infrastructure will enable investigations in very high-speed 
optical transport, ultra dense wavelength division multiplexing, 
non-homogeneous fiber performance, optical burst switching, and 
interactive high-resolution visualization. Understanding these 
experimental technologies across wide area networks is key to deploying 
the advanced services necessary to meet the DoD mission over the next 10 
years. These efforts involve researchers at the ATDnet principal sites, 
regional MAX institutions, and their commercial partners.

Qwest will be the primary backbone provider for ATDnet, in partnership 
with Verizon and Fibergate, a fiber-optic communications company. A key 
aspect of this effort is to provide ATDnet members direct access to a 
broadband fiber infrastructure--which will allow the MAX-ATDnet 
partnership to provision the network with new and experimental optical 
technologies as needed, without the risk of disrupting essential and 
production services, on the available commercial networks. It is 
envisioned that some of the applications to be tested will utilize 
single-stream bandwidths as high as 40-80-160 Gbps--capacities not 
feasible across current commercial networks.

MAX, which will be responsible for the day-to-day operational aspects of 
the core ATDnet infrastructure, was founded in 1999 by the University of 
Maryland, Georgetown University, George Washington University, and 
Virginia Tech. MAX operates one of the distributed 'gigaPoPs' in support 
of the national Internet2 initiative, providing connectivity to the 
Qwest-supplied Internet2 Abilene backbone through a 2.5 
gigabit-per-second (OC-48) network in the Washington, D.C. metro area. 
The MAX network consists of a 50-mile ring of fiber optic cable with 
extensions into the Baltimore area and Northern Virginia. MAX is a 
consortium of regional university and government research labs with 
primary facilities located at the University of Maryland, College Park.

"MAX was created by the partner universities to meet the advanced 
network needs of our universities for both research and 
education--capabilities and services not available through the 
commercial internet," said Don Riley, Vice President and Chief 
Information Officer of the University of Maryland. "The goal was to 
provide the advanced network infrastructure required to support both the 
experimental deployment of evolving advanced network technologies, and 
the development and deployment of new applications. This new partnership 
with the ATDnet consortium represents a significantly broader 
collaboration toward understanding how to design and manage the new 
generation of optical networking technologies."

Jerry Sobieski, Director Network Engineering for MAX, said, "The close 
collaboration between the ATDnet community, the MAX community, and the 
commercial partners creates a technology pipeline where ATDnet takes 
laboratory technologies into the wide area infrastructure, MAX then 
deploys them as they mature into the 'early adopter' network to address 
applications deployment and scaling issues, and the carriers then 
commercialize the services in the private sector. We now have the 
capability to explore and integrate interesting new technologies at any 
layer of the network protocol stack, and to do so in a coordinated 
fashion among the regional research and education community. It's really 
cool."

###

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Date: Fri, 17 May 2002 12:36:14 -0700 (PDT)
From: "Lucy E. Lynch" 
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Subject: Hands-on Multicast Workshop
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The University of Oregon will be hosting a hands-on Multicast Workshop for
Internet2 connected organizations. The workshop will be held in Eugene,
Oregon June 19-21, 2002. We are very pleased to have two star instructors:
Greg Shepherd of Juniper Networks & Beau Williamson of Cisco Systems.
Details can be found here:

http://www.internet2.edu/multicast/workshops/workshop-oregon-200206.shtml

This is the first in what will hopefully be an on-going set of workshops
(like the current IPv6 series). Space is limited to 20 students and you
can register using the web-based form found here:

http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~llynch/mregistration_form.html

Please address any questions you may have to me,

Lucy E. Lynch                           Academic User Services
Computing Center                        University of Oregon

                (541) 346-1774/Cell: 912-7998

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