[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.
Archives at: <http://Wireless.Com/Dewayne-Net>
Weblog at: <http://weblog.warpspeed.com>
-------------------------------------
You are subscribed as roessler@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
To manage your subscription, go to
http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip
Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/