News

Cypress, Calif. - National LambdaRail (NLR), a consortium of leading U.S. research universities and private sector technology companies that is deploying a nationwide optical, Ethernet and IP networking infrastructure, has gathered a team of leading researchers and technologists to guide and direct NLR's support of networking research. The NLR Networking Research Council (NNRC) is chaired by David J. Farber, NLR's Chief Scientist and a distinguished professor at Carnegie Mellon University.

NLR provides researchers unprecedented control over a nationwide network infrastructure with up to 40 individual lightpaths-each of which can transmit data at 10 gigabits per second and be used to deploy dedicated side-by-side, but physically and operationally separate, production and experimental networks. NLR has committed to devoting half of this capacity to support networking research, with the goal of bringing together networking research communities to solve complex challenges of architecture, end-to-end performance and scaling for future-generation networks.

"National LambdaRail provides networking researchers a unique set of resources for exploring revolutionary new approaches to networking," said David Farber, chair of the NLR Network Research Council. "It is increasingly clear that we need to look beyond incremental improvements to address challenges facing the Internet, and NLR allows us to do that in ways that wouldn't otherwise be possible."

In addition to providing NLR with overall guidance relating to its support of networking research, the NNRC will provide principles, policies and procedures for the use of the NLR infrastructure for networking research purposes, and will promote the extensive and active use of the NLR infrastructure by networking researchers.

Craig Partridge, Chief Scientist at BBN Technologies and a member of the NNRC, said, "Two guiding principles in networking research are that good solutions are those that work over wide area networks and that, to make progress, one has to be willing to risk occasionally breaking the network. The expense of building a big network means that we rarely get to build big networks that can fail. NLR's great gift is it gives researchers a wide area network where they can take risks."

In addition to David Farber, members of the NNRC include:

• Paul Barford, University of Wisconsin, Madison
• Dan Blumenthal, University of California, Santa Barbara
• Javad Boroumand, Cisco Systems
• Hank Dardy, U.S. Naval Research Laboratory
• Constantinos Dovorlis, Georgia Tech
• Gerald Faulhaber, University of Pennsylvania
• Paul Francis, Cornell University
• Dewayne Hendricks, Dandin Group
• Larry Landweber, University of Wisconsin-Madison and Internet2
• Jason Leigh, University of Illinois-Chicago
• Steven Low, Caltech
• Mike O'Dell, New Enterprise Associates
• Phil Papadopoulos, San Diego Supercomputer Center, University of California, San Diego
• Craig Partridge, BBN Technologies
• Harry Perros, North Carolina State University

The NLR infrastructure is already supporting cutting-edge uses of optical networking capabilities in research and education such as those being demonstrated at this week's SC|05 conference in Seattle, Wash., including the National Science Foundation-supported Extensible Terascale Facility and OptIPuter projects, the U.S. Department of Energy's UltraScience project, CENIC and the Pacific Northwest Gigapop's Pacific Wave project, and Internet2's Hybrid Optical Packet Infrastructure (HOPI) project.

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 www.nlr.net for more information.