National LambdaRail Consortium Completes Advanced Network Infrastructure

UCAR and Partners Realize 10 Gigabits per Second Goal
for Education and Research

February 20, 2006

BOULDER—National LambdaRail (NLR), a consortium of leading U.S. research universities and private sector technology companies including the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR), today announced that it has completed deployment of a nationwide advanced optical, Ethernet and IP networking infrastructure on more than 10,000 miles of fiber optic cable across the United States.

"Our participation in National LambdaRail enables a wide range of network and application research and support for the atmospheric and Earth-systems science community," says Marla Meehl, manager of Network Engineering and Telecommunications for UCAR's National Center for Atmospheric Research.

Thanks to the increased flexibility and capacity of the new network, scientists will be able to link models and move data faster and more reliably on dedicated lines. For example, the National Center for Atmospheric Research's premier climate model, the Community Climate System Model, will be used for runs of future climate in the next year that will require four times the current data volume. For these experiments, it will take less than an hour to move a volume of data that now takes more than seven hours. In addition to such scientific work, network engineers will also be able to acquire experimental bandwidth in order to test improvements to the system without disrupting traffic.

Meehl notes that UCAR's involvement in National LambdaRail grew out of participation in the Front Range GigaPOP, a consortium of universities, nonprofit corporations, and government agencies that share Wide Area Networking services. Besides UCAR, Front Range GigaPOP members participating in the National LambdaRail project are the Colorado School of Mines, Colorado State University, University of Colorado at Boulder, University of Colorado at Denver, NOAA Boulder labs, University of Utah, and the University of Wyoming.

The new technology supports research in science, engineering, health care, and education, as well as the research and development of new Internet technologies, protocols, applications and services.

The University Corporation for Atmospheric Research is a consortium of 69 universities offering Ph.D.s in the atmospheric and related sciences. UCAR manages the National Center for Atmospheric Research and the UCAR Office of Programs.

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.

More about the activation of this nationwide networking infrastructure is available in today's National LambdaRail news release.

UCAR is a contributing member of the National LambdaRail consortium, which has completed a network with 10 times the bandwidth of current systems in order to promote research on the scientific and networking fronts. (Illustration courtesy National LambdaRail.)

Related sites on the World Wide Web 

National LambdaRail News
UCAR Joins National LambdaRail—Network of the Future (news release, June 2004)
The Computational & Information Systems Laboratory at UCAR's National Center for Atmospheric Research

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