July 17, 2006 SINGAPORE - As of June 30, 2006, TransLight/Pacific Wave and TransLight/Starlight are now directly connected through a 10Gigabit Ethernet lightpath connection. The connection, donated by Cisco Systems in support of the TransLight project, is deployed by National LambdaRail. TransLight/StarLight and TransLight/Pacific Wave are projects funded by the National Science Foundation under the International Research Network Connections (IRNC) Program of the Office of CyberInfrastructure. This new network fabric between the two TransLight entities creates a way for participating networks to easily configure direct connections whenever they are needed. In a demonstration of this new capability, engineers at SURFnet in Amsterdam and T-LEX (operated by WIDE) in Tokyo easily established a direct path between their two routed networks using the new Pacific Wave to StarLight network fabric and without using any routed third party network facilities. "T-LEX and WIDE are pleased to showcase the ease with which we are now able to interconnect directly with our European partners at SURFnet using this new facility. We believe that this new capability will help to productively reshape research and collaborative efforts by removing some of the network complexity," said Professor Jun Murai, Vice President, Keio University, Director, WIDE Project, and IEEAF Board Vice Chair. "This new connection between SURFnet and our T-LEX/WIDE partners in Japan, made possible by the TransLight interconnect, illustrates the possibilities now available to research and education networks connected at these facilities. By supporting direct, easy-to-configure lightpath connections, research and education collaborations that require substantial bandwidth can now be set-up with minimal engineering intervention," said Kees Neggers, Managing Director, SURFnet Organization. The extensible switch fabric model was first put into production when Pacific Wave's node in Seattle and Pacific Wave's node in Los Angeles implemented a 10GE circuit the length of the U.S. West Coast. This extension allowed R&E networks connected at those two locations to exchange their traffic through direct mutual bilateral agreement, as if they were connected to the same physical device. This extended fabric now includes the TransLight/StarLight Chicago facility. "When the Pacific Wave peering fabric was successfully deployed two years ago, we saw immense possibilities. By effectively removing geography and large distances between routed network nodes and collapsing them into a single transparent exchange node, we felt that we could take this well beyond the Pacific coast of the U.S., and reach a much broader even global research community. The ease with which the SURFnet and T-LEX connection was established confirms this," said John Silvester, Professor of Computer Engineering at the University of Southern California, Chair of the Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California (CENIC), and principal_investigator of the TransLight/Pacific Wave NSF-IRNC award to the University of Southern California. "We see this as another significant step toward direct lightpath or GLIF (Global Lambda Integrated Facility)-like network services," he added. "Researchers have never before been able to build their own multi-national networks if it involved traversing the U.S. due to lack of available transport. Cisco's support and NLR's capabilities have helped us resolve this Europe-to-Asia transport problem by unifying the TransLight IRNC projects, extending Pacific Wave to StarLight, and creating a 3,000-mile-long GigaPoP (Los Angeles to Seattle to Chicago). This extension nicely complements the services already provided by CANARIE's CA*net 4 across Canada, adding resiliency and stability to the North American segment of the Global Lambda Integrated Facility (GLIF)," said Tom DeFanti, principal investigator of the TransLight/StarLight NSF-IRNC award to the University of Illinois at Chicago. Pacific Wave has nodes in Seattle, Sunnyvale, and Los Angeles and serves R&E networks throughout the Pacific Rim, including North America, South America, Australasia, Asia and the Middle East. The StarLight R&E exchange facility, an early leader and innovator in global networking, continues its networking leadership today with participating R&E organizations from Europe, North America and Asia. "The next generation of researchers using our global RR&E networks - whether it's the Large Hadron Collider in CERN, the NEPTUNE undersea laboratory of the Pacific Northwest coast of U.S. and Canada, CineGrid (the Digital Cinema Initiative), or the eVLBI spread across the globe - will be better positioned to transparently take advantage of existing large transoceanic and transcontinental circuits. Initiatives such as TransLight will reduce the number of network engineers and third parties needed to accomplish their data exchanges," said Professor Larry Smarr, director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology [Calit2], a partnership of the University of California at San Diego and UC Irvine, and principal investigator of the National Science Foundation-funded OptIPuter. "Milestones such as these are achieved only through the cooperation and dedication of many like-minded organizations. In addition to the groups already mentioned, this noteworthy achievement was made possible with contributions from the Pacific Northwest Gigapop, WIDE, CENIC, and the IEEAF. The research community is enriched by these efforts," said Prof. Ed Lazowska, Bill and Melinda Gates Chair in Computer Science and Engineering, University of Washington. About T-LEX/WIDE About SURFnet About Pacific Wave and TransLight/Pacific Wave About TransLight/StarLight About GLIF National LambdaRail About IEEAF Copyright 2006 PNWGP News |