News for and about the Internet2 community

["Lauren B. Kallens" <>]

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE                           

Contacts
Greg Wood
National LambdaRail

(202) 331-5360

Jon Bashor
ESnet

(510) 486-4300


U.S. Department of Energy Selects National LambdaRail For Next Generation
Backbone Network

Cypress, California - March 15, 2005 - National LambdaRail (NLR), a
consortium of leading U.S. research universities and private sector
technology companies, today announced that the U. S. Department of Energy's
Energy Sciences Network (ESnet), which supports the large-scale science and
large-scale collaborations of DOE's Office of Science, will use National
LambdaRail's unique nationwide optical network infrastructure to implement
an important part of its next generation backbone network.

ESnet connects scientists at all major DOE sites with high performance
speeds, as well as fast interconnections to more than 100 other networks.
These sites include some of the world's most prestigious research, such as
Argonne National Laboratory, Lawrence Berkeley National laboratory, Lawrence
Livermore National Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory, the National
Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, Oak Ridge National Laboratory,
the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories and
universities around the nation

William Johnston, ESnet program manager at Lawrence Berkeley National
Laboratory, said, "The nationwide National LambdaRail optical infrastructure
will ensure ESnet continues to meet the ever-increasing need of scientists
to gather, transfer and analyze massive amounts of scientific data. The
addition of NLR to the ESnet backbone will provide higher bandwidth, greater
reliability and new capabilities that will ensure that researchers have
access to the networking resources that are increasingly critical to
leading-edge science."

The selection of NLR is part of initial steps to implement a new network
architecture that will increase the reliability, dramatically boost the
bandwidth, and provide the basis for making advanced network services such
as guaranteed bandwidth virtual circuits available to the DOE research
community. The new architecture is designed to meet the increasing demand
for network bandwidth and is essential to support continuous science data
analysis (e.g., from the CERN particle accelerator's CMS and ATLAS high
energy physics experiments in Switzerland) by thousands of U.S. scientists,
and to support real-time interaction with on-line facilities, such as DOE's
Spallation Neutron Source at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the STAR
experiment at Brookhave Natonal Laboratory and magnetic fusion experiments
at General Atomics, Princeton Plasma Physics Lab, and MIT.

Tom West, CEO for National LambdaRail, said, "The unique capabilities of the
NLR infrastructure are a natural match for the new ESnet architecture and
the requirements of the DOE research community. Conducting the most advanced
science increasingly depends on the kind of networking facilities NLR
provides."

Under the recently signed agreement, National LambdaRail will provide the
first two segments of the DOE's new Science Data Network backbone. Links
from San Diego to Silicon Valley to Seattle will provide 10 gigabits per
second of bandwidth to General Atomics, UC San Diego, Pacific Northwest
National Laboratory, the University of Washington, and connect to several
international trans-Pacific links through the Pacific Northwest GigaPop.
These links, which will provide 64 times more bandwidth than currently
available, will be in place by mid-summer.

# # #

About ESnet
The ESnet project mission is to help accelerate the pace of progress for the
broad scientific research activities within the DOE by providing advanced
communications and networking support to the research community. The project
focus is to provide high performance and leading-edge capabilities on a cost
effective and reliable basis. 
Because of the broad range of research activities within the DOE, a diverse
range of capabilities is required of ESnet, including very high end-to-end
performance levels, global interconnectivity, remote access to very costly
experimental facilities, state-of-the-art collaboration tools and support,
and high reliability and availability. Additional 
information is available at www.es.net.


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.nlr.net
for more information.