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More on National LambdaRail
From: Dave Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Mon, 06 Oct 2003 19:22:23 -0400
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 interesting-people () lists elistx com To manage your subscription, go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/
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