National LambdaRail
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| Purpose | Research Network |
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Region served
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United States |
National LambdaRail (NLR) was a 12,000-mile (19,000 km), high-speed national computer network owned and operated by the U.S. research and education community. In November 2011 the control of NLR was purchased from its university membership by a billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong. NLR ceased operations in March 2014
The goals of the National LambdaRail project are:
NLR uses fiber-optic lines, and is the first transcontinental 10 Gigabit Ethernet network. Its high capacity (up to 1.6 Tbit/s aggregate), high bitrate (40 Gbit/s implemented; planning for 100 Gbit/s underway) and high availability (99.99% or more), enable National LambdaRail to support demanding research projects. Users include NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and over 280 research universities and other laboratories. In 2009 National LambdaRail was selected to provide wide-area networking for U.S. laboratories participating in research related to the Large Hadron Collider project, based near Geneva, Switzerland.
It is primarily oriented to aid terascale computing efforts and to be used as a network testbed for experimentation with large-scale networks. National LambdaRail is a university-based and -owned initiative, in contrast with the Abilene Network and Internet2, which are university-corporate sponsorships. National LambdaRail does not impose any acceptable use policies on its users, in contrast to commercial networks. This gives researchers 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) time-division multiplexing circuits or Ethernet signals for Gigabit Ethernet or 10 Gigabit Ethernet.
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