National Lambda Rail (NLR)

This is a work-in-progress & will be updated soon! :-D

Source Reese/NLR

Quotes taken from nlr.net

The foundation of the NLR infrastructure is a dense wave division multiplexing (DWDM)-based national optical footprint using Cisco Systems' 15454 optical electronic systems, with a maximum capacity of 40 and 32 wavelengths per fiber pair respectively. Each wavelength can support transmission at 10 billion bits per second (10 Gbps). This optical system is deployed nationwide across roughly 15,000 route-miles of dark fiber that NLR has obtained through Level 3 Communications. Four NLR wavelengths have been implemented using 10 Gigabit Ethernet LAN PhY (physical layer), a technology and architecture that had previously been limited to metro-area networks. NLR can also support the SONET (Synchronous Optical NETwork) Technology employed in traditional telecommunications networks, if needed. The initial wavelengths provide:

• a national 10 Gbps IP network to support internetworking and end-to-end transport protocol experiments,
• the first-ever national switched Ethernet experimental network with circuit-like 1 Gbps services,
• a quick-start facility for new research projects in support of data- and computation intensive science projects, and a redundant sparing capability in the event of a channel-specific failure.

Additional wavelengths are activated across individual segments of the infrastructure as needed. A more detailed description of NLR services and a guide for researchers interested in using NLR services are available. Nearly a dozen research projects are already using NLR services.

Quotes taken from Wikipedia

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.