National LambdaRail is a high-speed national computer network infrastructure in the United States that runs over fiber-optic lines, and is the first transcontinental Ethernet network. The name is shared by the organization of research institutions that developed the network, and, to date, plans to continue developing it. LambdaRail is similar to the Abilene Network, but LambdaRail permits deeper experimentation than Abilene does.
It is primarily oriented to aid terascale computing efforts and to be used as a network testbed for experimentation with next-generation large-scale networks. National LambdaRail is a university-based and -owned initiative, in contrast with Abilene and Internet2, which are university-corporate sponsorships. This gives universities more control to use the network for these research projects. National LambdaRail also supports a production layer on its infrastructure.
Links in the network use dense wavelength-division multiplexing (DWDM), which allows up to 64 individual optical wavelengths to be used (depending on hardware configuration at each end) separated by 100 GHz spacing. At present, individual wavelengths are used to carry traditional OC-X (OC3, OC12, OC48 or OC192) TDM circuits or Ethernet signal for Gigabit Ethernet or 10 Gigabit Ethernet.
Erv Blythe is the Chair of the LambdaRail Board of Directors. In 2004, LambdaRail completed its first main "phase".
Goals
The goals of the National LambdaRail project are:
- To bridge the gap between leading-edge optical network research and state-of-the-art applications research;
- To push beyond the technical and performance limitations of today’s Internet backbones;
- To provide the growing set of major computationally-intensive science (often termed e-Science) projects, initiatives and experiments with the dedicated bandwidth, deterministic performance characteristics, and/or other advanced network capabilities they need; and
- To enable and to rekindle the possibilities for highly creative, out-of-the-box experimentation and innovation that characterized facilities-based network research during the early years of the Internet.
Participants
The following is a list, from the official LambdaRail web site, of LambdaRail member organizations (the list of LambdaRail "participants" includes many more universities and other organizations).
- Case Western Reserve University
- Cisco Systems
- Committee on Institutional Cooperation
- Cornell University / Northeast LambdaRail
- Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California
- Duke University (representing a coalition of North Carolina universities)
- Florida LambdaRail
- Front Range GigaPop / University Corporation for Atmospheric Research
- Lonestar Education and Research Network
- Louisiana Board of Regents
- Mid-Atlantic Terascale Partnership / the Virginia Tech Foundation
- National Aeronautics and Space Administration Labs
- Oak Ridge National Laboratory
- Oklahoma State Board of Regents
- Pacific Northwest Gigapop
- Pittsburgh Supercomputer Center / University of Pittsburgh
- Southeastern Universities Research Association
- Southern Light Rail
- University of New Mexico (on behalf of the State of New Mexico)
- Black Mountain Systems
External links
This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)
