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[IP] More on National LambdaRail



At 01:22 PM 10/6/2003, you wrote:
[Note:  This item comes from reader Dave Staudt.  DLH]

At 10:56 AM -0600 10/6/03, Dave Staudt wrote:
Wednesday, September 17, 2003



  New Academic Consortium Plans to Spend $100-Million on a
  National Optical Research Network

  By FLORENCE OLSEN


  A group of universities and university consortia on Tuesday
  announced ambitious plans to build a $100-million
  infrastructure for experimental research on optical networks
  and other types of advanced scientific, engineering, and
  medical research.

  The initial members of the nonprofit consortium, called
  National LambdaRail Inc., include the Internet2 consortium and
  the Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in
  California, two large university consortia that have played
  leading roles in developing advanced research and education
  networks.

  The national optical network is expected to become the
  foundation for what National Science Foundation officials have
  described as a global "cyberinfrastructure" needed for future
  advances in science and engineering. As such, the LambdaRail
  is "critical to progress in every field of science and
  engineering," Peter Freeman, assistant director for the NSF's
  Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate,
  said in a prepared statement released on Tuesday.

  Thomas W. West, the chief executive officer of the new
  consortium, declined to say exactly how much individual
  universities would be charged to build and use the national
  optical network. But the investment of its anticipated "16 to
  20 major participants," he said, would be a combined total of
  $80-million to $100-million over a five-year period.

  "Everyone who is participating in this understands that this
  is an investment," Mr. West said, "an investment that we hope
  will benefit the universities and the research community." But
  none of the universities involved is expecting to reap
  financial returns from the investment, he said.

  Construction of the nationwide network will take months and is
  not expected to be completed until April. Fiber-optic lines
  for the network are already in the ground, but it will take
  months for technicians to install the optical equipment,
  switches, and routers needed to turn the fiber-optic cable
  into a usable network.

  In its first phase, the national network will have connection
  points in Atlanta; Chicago; Denver; Jacksonville, Fla.;
  Pittsburgh; Raleigh, N.C.; Seattle; Sunnyvale, Calif.; and
  Washington, D.C. Work on installing optical equipment,
  routers, and switches to bring up the first usable "leg" of
  the network -- Chicago to Pittsburgh and back -- will begin
  next Monday, Mr. West said.

  Cisco Systems Inc. will provide the initial equipment for the
  National LambdaRail network. The new hardware, which is being
  manufactured in Salem, N.H., and in Italy, includes 20
  routers, 20 switches, and "hundreds" of optical repeaters,
  said Bob J. Aiken, director of engineering for the academic
  research and technology initiatives group at Cisco.

  The National LambdaRail network will be different from the
  Internet2 consortium's Abilene network in many respects, the
  most important of which has to do with "ownership and
  control," Mr. West said.

  Abilene is a network that member universities and corporations
  lease from Qwest Communications International. The new optical
  network will be owned and controlled by members of the
  National LambdaRail consortium, Mr. West said.

  The network will have a capacity of 40 gigabits per second,
  which is four times that of the Abilene network. Universities
  will be able to gain exclusive access to a portion of that
  capacity to conduct research requiring extremely high
  bandwidth.

  The new venture will give researchers an opportunity, among
  other things, to experiment with building cross-country
  networks that operate like campus networks and rely on
  Ethernet protocols familiar to most network engineers.

  The initial members of the consortium include the Corporation
  for Education Network Initiatives in California; Duke
  University, representing a coalition of North Carolina
  universities; Florida LambdaRail; the Georgia Institute of
  Technology; the Mid-Atlantic Terascale Partnership and the
  Virginia Tech Foundation; the Pacific Northwest GigaPop; the
  Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center; Cisco Systems; Internet2;
  and the Committee on Institutional Cooperation. The latter is
  an academic consortium whose members include the Big 10
  universities and the University of Chicago.


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