The National Lambda Rail is a high speed national ethernet based network that runs over fibre-optic lines. It is primarily oriented to aid terascale computing efforts, but is also not intended to be a service network, but to be used as a network testbed for experimentation with next generation large-scale networks. The lambda rail is a university based and owned initiative, as compared to Abilene and Internet2, which are university-corporate sponsorships. This gives universities more control to use the internet for these research projects.
Goals
The goals of the National Lambda Rail project are:
- To bridge the gap between leading-edge optical network research and state-of-the-art applications research;
- To push beyond the technical and performance limitations of today’s Internet backbones;
- To provide the growing set of major computationally intensive science (often termed e-Science) projects, initiatives and experiments with the dedicated bandwidth, deterministic performance characteristics, and/or other advanced network capabilities they need; and
- To enable and to rekindle the possibilities for highly creative, out-of-the-box experimentation and innovation that characterized facilities-based network research during the early years of the Internet.
Members
External links
