News for and about the Internet2 community

[Michelle Pollak <>]

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 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 (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