Korea Connects to StarLight across Canada's Optical CA*net 4 Network; Joins TransLight and GLIF

CHICAGO, IL -- A flurry of e-mails between network engineers in North America and South Korea last week unofficially marked the "lighting" of an optical path now transiting Korea's research traffic from Seoul, across Canada to Chicago.

In a special arrangement between Canadian, Korean and U.S. networking project personnel, KREONet2 and KOREN, the national research networks of Korea, now transit traffic from the Pacific Northwest GigaPoP (PNWGP) in Seattle, where Korea's transpacific link lands, to StarLight in Chicago via Canada's optical research network CA*net 4.

KREONet2 and KOREN, two distinct research communities sharing one link, disconnected its 155Mbps connection to STAR TAP, StarLight's ATM-based predecessor also located in Chicago, on April 30. The networks now peer with a global community of research and education networks at StarLight, a National Science Foundation-funded optical facility that supports 1Gbps, 2.5Gbps and 10Gbps links.

KREONet2 and KOREN join two other leading research networks in Ireland and Taiwan to autonomously cross connect over CA*net 4 using its User Controlled LightPath (UCLP) network management software. UCLP allows end users to create and manage their own optical lightpath without signaling or requiring permission from any central network management authority. Other features allow users to create lambda grid networks optimized for the needs of high-end applications and data flows. UCLP is co-funded by Cisco Canada and CANARIE Inc., Canada's Advanced Internet Development Organization.

"This arrangement affords Korea's research networks, and by extension its scientific community, the flexibility to control and provision data flow at will," said Bill St. Arnaud, Senior Director Advanced Networks for CANARIE Inc. "It permits a much greater ability to innovate in the development of network-based applications."

CA*net 4 is one of a number of international networks in North America and the Pacific Rim that peer at the PNWGP, an international peering facility in Seattle since 1998. Pacific Wave is a joint project of PNWGP and the Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California (CENIC) to create, deploy and operate an advanced, extensible peering facility along the entire U.S. Pacific Coast.

"This international cooperative arrangement in support of research is precisely what the Pacific Wave peering infrastructure aims to facilitate," said Ron Johnson, Vice President and Vice Provost of the University of Washington. University of Washington founded and largely built the PNWGP. It also created and now hosts the Pacific Wave international peering service.

The Korean government supports efforts to foster innovative research in various science and engineering disciplines based on Grids and e-Science. The StarLight connection plays a major role in advancing Korea's research, which relies on high-performance computing and high-speed networks. StarLight's advanced optical infrastructure provides network services optimized for high-performance applications, such as High Voltage Electron Microscopy (HVEM) research at the Korea Basic Science Institute.

The Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information (KISTI) Supercomputing Center is another key institution. "KISTI has a long history of supporting supercomputer users for the advancement of science and technology, and optical networking is a natural extension of this effort," said Jysoo Lee, Director of the KISTI Supercomputer Center.

The StarLight connection also enables Korea to actively participate in building the global research infrastructure and further its contributions to innovative science and technology. Korea is joining StarLight's TransLight and Global Lambda Integrated Facility (GLIF) consortia, two initiatives that serve complementary goals in StarLight's community of optical or "lambda" connected networks. TransLight is a partnership of countries, consortia and institutions willing to make lambdas available to the global e-science community for scheduled use. TransLight is the underlying infrastructure for GLIF, a world-scale "virtual" laboratory for application and middleware development, where applications rely on dynamically configured optical wavelength networks.

"KISTI will actively participate in TransLight and GLIF in order to work with this global alliance on the development of the Lambda Grid for e-Science," said Lee.

About KREONet2 / KOREN
KREONet2 (Korea Research Environment Open Network 2), established in 1988, is a national R&D network run by KISTI (Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information) and supported by Korea's Ministry Of Science & Technology (MOST). KREONet2 provides high-end application services for the Korean scientific and R&D community. It is a non-profit scientific research network with over 250 member organizations. KOREN (KOrea advanced REsearch Network) was founded in 1995 to provide a research environment for the development of high-speed telecommunications equipment and application services. KOREN is a non-profit research network subsidized by the Ministry of Information and Communications (MIC), and provides universities, laboratories and industrial institutes with a research and development environment for 6T-related technology and application services. KREONet2 and KOREN have cooperated since 2001 to provide international transit network service for Korean science and technology research communities.

About StarLight
StarLight is an advanced optical infrastructure and proving ground for network services optimized for high-performance applications. Operational since summer 2001, StarLight is a 1GE and 10GE switch/router facility for high-performance access to participating networks and also offers true optical switching for wavelengths. StarLight is being developed by the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Chicago, the International Center for Advanced Internet Research at Northwestern University, and the Mathematics and Computer Science Division at Argonne National Laboratory. Funding for StarLight comes from the National Science Foundation (SCI-9980480).

About CANARIE Inc. and CA*net 4
CANARIE Inc. is Canada's advanced Internet development organization. CANARIE's mission is to accelerate Canada's advanced Internet development and use by facilitating the widespread adoption of faster, more efficient networks and by enabling the next generation of advanced products, applications and services to run on them. CA*net 4 is CANARIE's optical Internet research and education network.

About Pacific Wave
Pacific Wave is a joint project of the Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California (CENIC) and the Pacific Northwest GigaPoP (PNWGP) to create, deploy and operate an advanced, extensible peering facility along the entire U.S. Pacific Coast. Pacific Wave supports peering among international and national networks as well as among organizations throughout the Pacific Northwest.

About TransLight
TransLight is a global-scale networking initiative that supports prototypes of the most aggressive e-science applications coming this decade. TransLight consists of many provisioned Gigabit Ethernet (GigE) circuits (called lambdas) among North America, Europe and Asia via StarLight in Chicago.

About GLIF
GLIF, the Global Lambda Integrated Facility, is a world-scale Lambda-based Laboratory for application and middleware development on emerging LambdaGrids, where applications rely on dynamically configured networks based on optical wavelengths. GLIF was established at the third annual LambdaGrid Workshop organized by SURFnet and University of Amsterdam, and hosted by NORDUnet at their annual conference in Reykjavik, Iceland, in August 2003.

Contact:
Jaesung Kwak
Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information (KISTI)
jskwak @ kisti.re.kr

Laura Wolf
University of Illinois at Chicago/StarLight
laura @ evl.uic.edu