Lambda rail network - Definition and Overview

The National Lambda Rail is a high speed national ethernet based network that runs over fibre-optic lines. It is primarily oriented to aid terascale computing efforts, but is also not intended to be a service network, but to be used as a network testbed for experimentation with next generation large-scale networks. The lambda rail is a university based and owned initiative, as compared to Abilene and Internet2, which are university-corporate sponsorships. This gives universities more control to use the internet for these research projects.

Goals

The goals of the National Lambda Rail 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.

Members

• [Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California (http://www.cenic.org/)]
• [Pacific Northwest GigaPop (http://www.pnw-gigapop.net/)]
• [Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (http://www.psc.edu/)]
• Duke University representing North Carolina Universities
• [Mid-Atlantic Terascale Partnership and the Virginia Tech Foundation (http://www.midatlantic-terascale.org/)]
• Cisco_Systems,_Inc.
• Internet2
• [Florida LambdaRail (http://www.flrnet.org/)]
• Georgia Institute of Technology
• [Committee on Institutional Cooperation (http://www.cic.uiuc.edu/)]

External links

• National Lambda Rail (http://www.nlr.net/)