U.S. Department of Energy Selects National LambdaRail for Next-Generation Backbone Network
Note: This article was created as a National LambdaRail press release.
Cypress, California – March 15, 2005 – National LambdaRail (NLR), a consortium of leading U.S. research universities and private sector technology companies, today announced that the U. S. Department of Energy’s Energy Sciences Network (ESnet), which supports the large-scale science and large-scale collaborations of DOE’s Office of Science, will use National LambdaRail’s unique nationwide optical network infrastructure to implement an important part of its next generation backbone network.
ESnet connects scientists at all major DOE sites with high performance speeds, as well as fast interconnections to more than 100 other networks. These sites include some of the world’s most prestigious research, such as Argonne National Laboratory, Lawrence Berkeley National laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory, the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories and universities around the nation
William Johnston, ESnet program manager at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, said, “The nationwide National LambdaRail optical infrastructure will ensure ESnet continues to meet the ever-increasing need of scientists to gather, transfer and analyze massive amounts of scientific data. The addition of NLR to the ESnet backbone will provide higher bandwidth, greater reliability and new capabilities that will ensure that researchers have access to the networking resources that are increasingly critical to leading-edge science.”
The selection of NLR is part of initial steps to implement a new network architecture that will increase the reliability, dramatically boost the bandwidth, and provide the basis for making advanced network services such as guaranteed bandwidth virtual circuits available to the DOE research community. The new architecture is designed to meet the increasing demand for network bandwidth and is essential to support continuous science data analysis (e.g., from the CERN particle accelerator’s CMS and ATLAS high energy physics experiments in Switzerland) by thousands of U.S. scientists, and to support real-time interaction with on-line facilities, such as DOE’s Spallation Neutron Source at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the STAR experiment at Brookhave Natonal Laboratory and magnetic fusion experiments at General Atomics, Princeton Plasma Physics Lab, and MIT.
Tom West, CEO for National LambdaRail, said, “The unique capabilities of the NLR infrastructure are a natural match for the new ESnet architecture and the requirements of the DOE research community. Conducting the most advanced science increasingly depends on the kind of networking facilities NLR provides.”
Under the recently signed agreement, National LambdaRail will provide the first two segments of the DOE’s new Science Data Network backbone. Links from San Diego to Silicon Valley to Seattle will provide 10 gigabits per second of bandwidth to General Atomics, UC San Diego, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, the University of Washington, and connect to several international trans-Pacific links through the Pacific Northwest GigaPop. These links, which will provide 64 times more bandwidth than currently available, will be in place by mid-summer.
About ESnet
The ESnet project mission is to help accelerate the pace of progress for the broad scientific research activities within the DOE by providing advanced communications and networking support to the research community. The project focus is to provide high performance and leading-edge capabilities on a cost effective and reliable basis. Because of the broad range of research activities within the DOE, a diverse range of capabilities is required of ESnet, including very high end-to-end performance levels, global interconnectivity, remote access to very costly experimental facilities, state-of-the-art collaboration tools and support, and high reliability and availability. Additional information is available at www.es.net.
About National LambdaRail
National LambdaRail, Inc. (NLR) is a major initiative of U.S. research universities and private sector technology companies to provide a national scale infrastructure for research and experimentation in networking technologies and applications. NLR puts the control, the power and the promise of experimental network infrastructure in the hands of our nation’s scientists and researchers. Visit http://www.nlr.net for more information.
