National LambdaRail Lights 1st Network Path

PHOENIX, Nov. 19 -- National LambdaRail Inc. (NLR), a consortium of US research universities and private sector technology companies, announced it has lit the initial segment on its national footprint between Chicago and Pittsburgh -- connecting the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center to the Extensible Terascale Facility, the backplane network for the National Science Foundation's Teragrid project, through the StarLight Facility in Chicago.

TeraGrid is an effort to build the world's largest distributed infrastructure for open scientific research. By 2004, the TeraGrid will include 20 teraflops of computing power distributed at five sites, facilities capable of managing and storing nearly 1 petabyte of data, high-resolution visualization environments and tools for grid computing. Four new TeraGrid sites, announced in September, will add more scientific instruments, large datasets and additional computing power and storage capacity to the system. All the components will be connected through a network that operates at 40 Gb/s second.

The NLR network deployment began in September with Cisco Systems Inc. installing dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) extended long haul platforms every 100 kms, on intercity dark fiber NLR purchased from Level 3 Communications Inc. Cisco turned over seven 10 Gb/s wavelengths ('lambdas') to NLR along the 674 fiber miles between the two cities.

NLR is currently working on the Seattle to Portland, Ore., path, scheduled for completion by mid-January, and Portland to Sunnyvale, Calif., scheduled to be ready by mid-April. Other segments on the national footprint will include Pittsburgh to Washington D.C., Washington D.C. to Atlanta, Denver to Seattle, Atlanta to Jacksonville, and Chicago to Denver, Atlanta to Dallas, Dallas to San Diego and Washington D.C. to New York City. They are scheduled to be implemented in 2004.

Cisco Systems has provided equipment including optical dense wavelenth division multiplexers, Ethernet switches and IP routers; as well as installation, testing, and product maintenance services. Level 3 is providing dark fiber and collocation facilities on the NLR core backbone infrastructure.

For more information, visit: www.nationallambdarail.org