With funding from the National Science Foundation, the StarLight International/National Communications Exchange Facility was created as an evolution of the earlier NSF STAR TAP (Science, Technology, And Research Transit Access Point—the world's first international exchange developed to support advanced digital communication services for worldwide scientific research communities), as an advanced optical infrastructure and proving ground for network services optimized for high-performance applications.

StarLight is an Open Exchange Point co-managed by the StarLight Consortium, comprised of the International Center for Advanced Internet Research (iCAIR) at Northwestern University, the University of California at San Diego, the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), and the Mathematics and Computer Science Division at Argonne National Laboratory, in partnership with Canada's CANARIE and the Netherlands' SURFnet.

The StarLight Consortium and its research partners are creating new methods and technologies to allow for greater services and configuration flexibility than existing networks. For example, StarLight provides tools, techniques, and technologies that enable end-processes to dynamically control lightpaths, including those supporting 1.6 Tbps flows. These mechanisms empower applications to adjust and optimize network resources to meet precise requirements and adjust dynamically to real time conditions.

The StarLight consortium is participating in the creation of a global proving ground in support of distributed computational facilities for data-intensive eScience applications, including network performance measurement and analysis and computing and networking technology evaluations. StarLight is also a co-location facility providing space, power, evironmental conditioning, and fiber to allow its members to engage in next-generation optical network and application research and development activities. StarLight provides support for multiple network and computing experimental research testbeds, including those that are national and international in scale.

A key StarLight resource is the NSF funded International Software Defined Exchange (iSDX) a flexible, scalable, programmable platform designed for large scale global data-intensive science. The iSDX initiative comprises a) production services, b) a series of experimental research projects, c) an experimental research testbed, and d) a means of integrating multiple experimental research testbeds. Services incorporate those based on 400 Gbps Data Transfer Nodes (DTNs) for Wide Area Networks (WANs), including trans-oceanic WANs. Currently, a key focus is scaling to 400, 800, 1.2 Tbps, and 1.6 Tbps Gbps WANs and LAN E2E technologies that provide high-performance transport services and protocols for exascale science, controlled using programmable data plane techniques such as Software Defined Networking (SDN), Software Defined exchanges (SDXs) and techniques for programming data planes, e.g., with the P4 network programming language. Another research area is providing interoperability between services among open exchange points.

The StarLight Facility also provides core services and resources for the Global Research Platform and related research platforms