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September 17, 2003

CIC Joins Emerging National Networking Collaboration to Light the Future

Imagine a “cyber laboratory” in which higher education’s academic and research communities across the nation collaborate, visualize, explore, and discover using experimental applications that require very high-speed connections unavailable even today. The member institutions of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC) share this vision, and have pooled resources to join as a full founding member of National LambdaRail, Inc. (NLR). NLR, a national optical fiber networking collaboration in the early stages of development, seeks to provide such an environment for scientists and researchers in the United States.

NLR is procuring a new infrastructure which will provide a wide range of facilities, capabilities, and services in support of both application and networking experimentation. NLR will serve a diverse set of communities, including computational scientists, distributed systems researchers, and networking researchers. CIC’s participation in NLR will help ensure its member universities’ researchers and scientists in these fields remain on the leading edge of revolutionary networking possibilities in scientific collaboration.

In addition to the CIC, NLR’s membership to date represents public and private higher education institutions and information technology industries, including: Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California (CENIC); Pacific Northwest GigaPop (PNWGP); Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center; Duke University, representing a coalition of North Carolina Universities; Mid-Atlantic Terascale Partnership (MATP) and the Virginia Tech Foundation; Cisco Systems; Internet2®; Florida LambdaRail, LLC; Georgia Institute of Technology. For more information about NLR, see: www.nationallambdarail.org.

“The CIC is pleased to play a founding role in the deployment of NLR as a key element in the development of the overall national cyber infrastructure” said Michael A. McRobbie, Vice President for Information Technology & CIO and Vice President for Research at Indiana University and Chair of the CIC Chief Information Officer (CIO) Group. He added “The development of this cyber infrastructure, building on the successes of complementary predecessor elements such as Internet2’s Abilene network, will certainly help support the advancement of research across a broad spectrum of scientific opportunities.”

Greg Jackson is the representative of the CIC CIOs to the NLR Board of Directors, and is, as such, a voting member. “Internet2 has enabled colleges and universities to imagine and then implement applications that would have been unthinkable had we all continued to rely on the commodity Internet for inter-institutional data networking,” said Mr. Jackson, who serves as Vice President and CIO at the University of Chicago. “In much the same way, NLR lays a foundation for even more advanced applications-applications our faculty are just beginning to think about. Because of current telecommunications business circumstances, this is a particularly opportune time for us in higher education to acquire these resources, and for us in the CIC to help lead that effort.”

“National LambdaRail represents the next major step in advanced networking to support cutting-edge scientific research,” said Lou Anna K. Simon, Interim President, Michigan State University and Chair of the CIC. “With the participation of the CIC institutions, thirteen of the nation’s leading research universities join NLR, greatly enhancing and extending the reach of this project and the scope of the ongoing research it will support.”

Founded in 1958, the CIC is a consortium of twelve research universities including the eleven members of the Big Ten Athletic Conference and the University of Chicago. CIC Member universities include University of Chicago, University of Illinois, Indiana University, University of Iowa, University of Michigan, Michigan State University, University of Minnesota, Northwestern University, Ohio State University, Pennsylvania State University, Purdue University and University of Wisconsin-Madison. Together, CIC member universities confer nearly 15% of the Ph.D. degrees awarded in the United States annually, employ more that 33,000 faculty and enroll nearly one-half million students. Together, CIC Institutions’ research and development spending exceeded $4 billion in 2001. For more information about the CIC, see: www.cic.uiuc.edu

Contact:
Karen Partlow
Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC)
kpartlow @ cic.uiuc.edu
ph: +1.217.265.0395