Consortium Launches Networking Infrastructure InitiativeWASHINGTON
The National LambdaRail Inc. (NLR), a consortium of leading U.S. research universities and private sector technology companies, announced last month that it is deploying a new national networking infrastructure to foster the concurrent advancement of networking research and next generation network-based applications in science, engineering and medicine. The NLR aims to re-energize innovative research and development into next generation network technologies, protocols, services and applications, according to officials.
“National LambdaRail is an important development by the community. It will contribute to the cyberinfrastructure that is critical to progress in every field of science and engineering,” says Dr. Peter Freeman, assistant director for the Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate of the National Science Foundation. “We are very pleased because this can lead to significantly expanded access for many researchers and educators to computational, analytical and visualization tools, as well as large data repositories. This will help create new scientific opportunities across the frontier.”
NLR is considered one of the most ambitious research and education networking initiatives since the development of ARPANET and the NSFnet, both of which led to the commercialization of the Internet. In the spirit of these great success stories, NLR strives to again stimulate and support innovative network research to go above and beyond the current incremental evolution of the Internet. The results of such endeavors are expected to facilitate further commercial development and creation of new technologies and markets, thereby stimulating economic development and contributing to U.S. national competitiveness.
The new infrastructure provides a wide range of facilities, capabilities and services in support of both application level and networking level experiments. NLR serves a diverse set of communities including computational scientists, distributed systems researchers and networking researchers. NLR aims to bring these communities closer together to solve complex architectural and end-to-end network scaling challenges, officials say.
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