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Nationwide Fiber Optic Science Network
zCyl writes "An article at SMH describes a large fiber optic network called the National LambdaRail, which has completed 1,084 out of a planned 16,000 kilometers between major universities and research institutions. Upon completion it should transmit 400 Gbps and stretch across the continental U.S. Access to the network will be intentionally restricted to scientists and researchers only 'for research and experimentation in networking technologies and applications'."
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Half that bandwidth will be used by spammers.
fp
PHOENIX, AZ - November 18, 2003 - National LambdaRail, Inc. (NLR), a consortium of leading U.S. research universities and private sector technology companies, today announced that it successfully lit the initial segment on its national footprint between Chicago and Pittsburgh - connecting the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) to the Extensible Terascale Facility (ETF), the backplane network for the National Science Foundation's Teragrid project, through the StarLight Facility in Chicago.
The deployment began early September 2003 with Cisco Systems, Inc. installing dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) extended long-haul platforms every 100 kilometers on intercity dark fiber NLR purchased from Level 3 Communications, Inc. (Nasdaq:LVLT). On November 14, meeting the target completion date, Cisco turned over seven 10 Gbps wavelengths ('lambdas') to NLR along the 674 fiber miles between the two cities.
"The Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center chose the NLR infrastructure over leased fiber because of the flexibility allowed and the ability to use it as soon as possible," said Gwendolyn Huntoon, assistant director of the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center. "Additionally, we were thrilled with the role that Cisco Systems played during the build-out process. The level of support and cooperation shown by them was outstanding."
Tom West, CEO of National LambdaRail, Inc. said, "We are pleased that the first segment on the NLR infrastructure has been lit. It was very important to meet the time requirements of the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center and the NLR schedule. The smoothness of this initial implementation demonstrated the cooperation among the professionals at Cisco, Level 3, StarLight, and the members of NLR. It gives us the confidence that the remaining paths will be lit as easily as this one."
NLR is currently working on the Seattle to Portland, Ore. path, scheduled for completion by mid-January 2004 and Portland to Sunnyvale, Calif., scheduled to be ready by mid-April 2004. Other segments on the national footprint include Pittsburgh to Washington D.C., mid-March 2004; Washington D.C. to Atlanta, mid-April 2004; Denver to Seattle, early June 2004; Atlanta to Jacksonville, mid-July 2004; and Chicago to Denver, mid-July 2004. Implementation of Atlanta to Dallas; Dallas to San Diego; and, Washington D.C. to New York City are scheduled for July to December 2004.
Cisco Systems' participation in this unique effort is both as the key provider of equipment and as a major proponent of the NLR objectives to advance research in networking and all fields of science. Cisco technologies including optical DWDM multiplexers, Ethernet switches and IP routers are being deployed; as well as installation, testing, and product maintenance services. Level 3 is the preferred provider of the dark fiber and collocation facilities on the NLR core backbone infrastructure.
# # #
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.nationallambdarail.org for more information.
About The Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center
The Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center is a joint effort of Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh together with the Westinghouse Electric Company. It was established in 1986 and is supported by several federal agencies, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and private industry. Visit http://www.psc.edu/ for more information.
About The Slashdot Moderators
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Contact:
Michelle Pollak
National LambdaRail, Inc.
(202) 331-5345
media@nationallambdarail.org
I wonder how long it will take for spammers to find a way into this network...
24 beers in a case, 24 hours in a day. Coincidence? I think not!
To answer the old question: How much pr0n can you download with a really fat pipe?
That means it should filter down to the common man in...oh, say 20 years or so. VIRTUAL PARTY AT MY HOUSE IN 2023!!!!!!
They dont need 400GBPS. They're too old to like p0rn :P
that I think you are crap.
this was called Internet2
Linking up universities and research centers with high-speed data communications. That has a real deja-ecoute sound to it.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
... that will be DR. First Post to you!
...)
(Yeah, I know this isn't the first post. But when I get that lambda connection
..But quite funny none the less! I wish we had had these kinds of tools at my last job!
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
Any plans to string a few lines up to Canada and connect our institutions up here?
Lets see Internet 2, the Science Network.... How about a network dedicated to just porn, a network for just sports media, and another network for just spam. How many nationwide networks are there going to be?
This is just one of the uses I can see for such a system. But being the way humans are since we have more bandwidth will use more bandwidth. We will never have the enough bandwidth to satisfy our needs. Because we will always find a use to the increase of bandwidth.
Get Movie Posters
What kind of equipment can actually handle data at those speeds? 50GB/sec is several times faster than even the fastest DDR ram... Is the networking equipment able to run so much faster because it's specialized to do one task?
I volunteer my computer to be a test node on the new system.
Think of all that pr0n!
Shouldn't getting broadband communication capabilities to rural America be a top priority also? Where I live, I cannot subscribe to DSL due to the poor quality of the telephone lines. Hell, just 4 years ago, the telephone company,(Inland Telephone), changed all the lines from the old aluminum wiring to the "new" copper wire. The fastest I can transfer connect out here is only at 33.6k on a good day. As we speak, I am only connected at 26.4k. I find this assanine, esepecially when I can move 14 miles to town, and have access to DSL, Cable, and WiFi. Out here, the only option for high speed data transfers is sattilite. Far too expensive for me. This should be a major priority if we intend to bring rural america out of the mid-ninteys, and into the 21st century of data transfer speed. Hell, I would be happy if I could connect at just 53k, but I do not think that the monopolistic telephone companies will be upgrading the lines within the next 20 years. After all, the aluminum wiring went out of common usage during the 1970's, when copper wire replaced it. How long am I going to have to wait for 56k capabilities, 40 more years? I will propanbly be dead by then, as that would put me at 65 years old.
Get your free Dropbox account with 2 GB Free storage!
"I would give my right hand to be ambidextrous."
Hackers and spammers will quickly target the network and find weak accounts and suddenly warez, porn, and spam will cross the net at ridiculous speeds.
Slashdot is supposed to be American.
Oh man, imagine the massive CounterStrike lan those guys have up right now... *drools*
"Do you suppose that's why God lives in the Heavens? Because he lives in fear of His creations?" - Steve Buscemi
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Alright, I have accounts on systems that will be connected to this so now I can find out faster than ever that the system I am trying to use is not available due to dedicated use.
The interesting thing to me is that the players in this are either universities, hardware vendors, or ISPs.
It's easy to see what the universities get out of it (no, it's not just p0rn). But the vendors? Aha! They get to do their R&D and call it a donation to a non-profit. They even get Slashdot to give them publicity for it.
Clever da5ebf%s^H^H^H^H^H^H ooops, sorry, my aluminum foil slipped off my head for an instant. Now I have to go shower again!
sigs, as if you care.
Give me Ludicrious speed! ZOOOOMMMMM!!!!!!! My GOD! They've gone to plaid.........
~corporate tool, but employed~
so does "scientists and researchers only" include GNU/linux repositories? traditionally universities tend to have contributors to linux and often host mirrors.
Imagine, a new distro, once uploaded on one university site, could spread across the country in literally no time at all!
You answered your own question: "I can move 14 miles to town, and have access to DSL, Cable, and WiFi"
The concept of rural is that which is distinguished from the city. While cities are havens for technology, the countryside is for nature. If you want tech, go where tech is, don't get angry because tech won't come to you. It's not cost effective to wire rural areas - isolated household require up to several miles of dedicated lines serving only one customer, which is not cost effective. It would require decades of subscription from you to pay for the lines to your house. This isn't the case in urban/suburban areas where individual houses only require a few dozen feet of cable.
Oh, and you wouldn't have the internet at all if not for the academics you're trying to fight. If you want a better connection, support the people trying to invent the technology to make it feasible.
GL
Distributed clusters of beowulf clusters anyone??? make one humongous supercluster up when you need it just by linking existing clusters...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
If this network is to stretch across the USA then no matter how fast it transfers data, there will still be a noticeable latency between one end and the other. The speed of light is not getting any faster. The limiting factor for serving files over NFS, for example, might end up being latency rater than bandwidth or server performance (if CPUs are also getting faster and RAM cheaper).
Perhaps in the future bandwidth will be an almost infinite resource and protocols will be designed around minimizing latency. For example for a remote filesystem you might design a server that spews out all changes to all files as they happen - to every other host that is looking at the filesystem. The bandwidth cost of sending unnecessary files is not significant, and it means a saving in latency because file data will be immediately available at the client end rather than requiring a round trip. (This assumes you don't care about locking and race conditions - but classical NFS doesn't anyway.)
Similarly, web servers might be designed to spew forth a whole bunch of pages you might possibly be interested in as soon as you connect to their site, and your browser's job is to cache them and then show the ones you want. If you want a page that isn't in the set the server sent you, you'll need to make another round trip, and that could be the slowest part. We will certainly need something like this for interplanetary web browsing at acceptable speeds.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Access to the network will be intentionally restricted to scientists and researchers only
No possiblitly of SPAM atleast as we know it...
---
Operating as VU2CLN somewhere on surface of the earth!
Although, if one were using 16 PCI Express lanes they could acheive 4GB/second (thats 32 gigabits per second).
I think they mispelled 'pr0n'.
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The european research network (up to 10Gbit/s) has an infomercial at their webpage that is interesting, since all the applications and benefits discussed pretty much applies in the US as well.
p2p. And once that happens, how long before the RIAA lawyers force their way onto this network?
Canada's current equivalent is called CA*Net4
CANET 4 Home Page
Link regarding international hookup to CANET 4.
"CA*net 4 also links to research networks in other countries including Internet 2 in the United States and Geant in Europe and is a partner along with SURFnet in the Netherlands and the STAR LIGHT in Chicago of the International Lambda Grid Testbed." (emphasis added)
So there you have it, a good portion of Canada's research institutions are are already linked into the Lambda initiative.
Why not just build this into I2... why make a seperate network for reasearch/whatnot amoung colleges.
Some poor NSF grant application reviewer will be saying, "WTF is with all of these grad student projects dealing with 'researching and networking simultaneous transfer of multiple large binary multimedia files'. "
__ Someday, but not this morning, I'll finally learn to use the preview button.
They are cooperating networks
http://www.360networks.com/Our_Networks.asp
_ Am erica.asp#
http://www.360networks.com/Our_Networks---North
If you want to pay for the cost of bringing broadband to the cows, go right ahead. I don't want to pay for it: I already pay enough for my house (mortgage, taxes, etc.) and ability to live in a high-demand area, that I don't see any reason why I should help further subsidize your decision to live in cheapville.
To sum:
PAY FOR IT YOURSELF! PAY FOR IT YOURSELF! PAY FOR IT YOURSELF! PAY FOR IT YOURSELF!
Clear enough?
[ home ]
sounds a lot like how the original internet started out.
hopefully this will stay as something for the scientists only.
At least for universities.
I hope they plan on putting in an infrastructure
for other data.
Seriously though. Did you know that if you send a 10megabyte file to the wrong address at AOL, the server sends you an error message WITH THE TEN
MEGABYTE FILE AS AN INLINE ATTACHMENT!
If you've ever wondered why your paths to slashdot
are slow on a sunday morning, blame AOL. And every
other moron sysadmin out there who sends a copy
of the damn thing back instead of a 4Kb message
"no addressee by that name here"
Black hole the shit!
F-n Dickheads!
From what I can understand (amongst all the blurb) this LambdaRail is all about a complete network of (lots-and-lots-of) switched 10Gbps Lambdas (optical wavelengths). So at any point you can dedicate N Lambdas to a particular use and guarantee (at a physical/optical level) bandwidth/latency/QoS.
Specifically, absolutely unconditionally zero impact to any other data transmissions across the network because these transmissions are actually physically (ie optically) seperate and distinct transmissions.
In short, if we could literally segment a 'slice' off the network and isolate it from everything else running around, what would/could we do with it?
Internet2 is a completely different concept.
All the data is transmitted across one network (ie not guaranteed via 'optical separation'; ie 'just like The Internet Today, only much faster') and researching how to route/switch/filter a trillion-zillion packets with minimal latency/guaranteed QoS/additional application-specific functionality and then given those network-abilities researching how to manage that network and what new uses you can apply to that network.With (apparently) the specific intention of eventually, one day, before-the-heat-death-of-the-universe, rolling out said network and enhanced functionality to "the real world/the rest of us humans".
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
Nation wide means US wide.
Why wait for someone else to bring you broadband? Why not build it yourself? Get together with your neighbours and form a cooperative to bring in the line, then set up wifi repeaters with yagi antennas for the last mile.
Try googleing for terms like "rural 802.11 cooperative".
"Well, slap me silly and call me Gordon Freeman!"