About

TransLight/StarLight and TransLight/Pacific Wave are complementary efforts funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) to provide multi-gigabit links and supporting infrastructure to interconnect U.S., European and Pacific Rim research and education networks, and to supplement the available bandwidth that is being provided by other countries.

These efforts are part of the NSF's International Research Network Connections (IRNC) program to assist the U.S. research and education community by:

Funding international network links between U.S. and foreign science and engineering communities.
Encouraging the use of advanced architectures.
Supporting advanced science and engineering requirements
Encouraging the development and leveraging of deployed infrastructure to meet current and anticipated needs.
Enabling network engineers to engage in system and technology demonstrations and rigorous experimentation.

In cooperation with U.S. and European National Research Networks, TransLight/StarLight is implementing a strategy to best serve established U.S. and European production science, including usage by those scientists, engineers and educators who have persistent large-flow, real-time, and/or other advanced application requirements.

TransLight/Pacific Wave is developing a distributed Open Exchange along the U.S. West Coast, from Seattle to San Diego, to interconnect North American, Asian, Australian, Mexican and South American links.

TransLight/StarLight and TransLight/Pacific Wave are directly connected through a 10Gigabit Ethernet lightpath connection donated by Cisco Systems and deployed by the National LambdaRail in support of the TransLight project.