SEATTLE – Today Pacific Wave and Northern Wave announced an agreement that will allow their participants to peer with each other. Northern Wave will now connect Pacific Wave (www.pacificwave.net) in Seattle to the StarLight International/National Communications Exchange Facility (www.startap.net/starlight) in Chicago. This relationship provides new opportunities for international research and education networks and university participants to exchange networking traffic at multi-Gigabit rates between the Pacific Rim, the US, and Europe. In addition, researchers and educators at any connecting institution along the Northern Wave path in Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota, Montana, and Washington will have access to participants on the Pacific Wave exchange.

Pacific Wave is state-of-the-art peering exchange facility that, for over 10 years, has connected research, scientific, and education institutions and networks throughout the Pacific Rim and the world, increasing network efficiency and throughput while reducing latency and costs. Pacific Wave is a joint project of the Corporation for Education and Network Initiatives in California (CENIC) and the Pacific Northwest GigaPoP (PNWGP) and is designed to enhance the efficiency of research and education network traffic across the west coast of the US and with partners around the Pacific Rim.

Northern Wave is a similar facility recently funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) via North Dakota State University (NDSU) and PNWGP to provide a new shared 10Gbps optical network connection between Seattle and Chicago for research and education institutions. The grant, part of NSF’s Academic Research Infrastructure program, funded optical equipment to build the network along a fiber path provided by PNWGP and the BOREAS network (a collaboration among the Universities of Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin-Madison, and Iowa State University (www.boreas.net).

“Northern Wave brings a significant new capacity to research and education networks through improved international communication facilities as well as the easy exchange of data for initiating collaborations with other institutions. This is especially important for the establishment of large competitive research centers. It will also provide connectivity to large computational and visualization platforms at remote locations,” says Kalpana Katti, North Dakota State University Distinguished Professor of Civil Engineering and NSF CAREER Award grantee.

“Connecting Northern Wave and Pacific Wave puts into place a new piece of the cyberinfrastructure necessary for complex interdisciplinary work on the cutting edge of science and technology,” said Amy Philipson, Executive Director, PNWGP. “Together with the other advances that Pacific Wave offers its participants, such as 100G networking along the US west coast, dynamic circuits, support for Science DMZ-model research networks, and software-defined networking, we’re delighted help facilitate the arrival of true 21st century networking.”

Northern Wave is supported by the National Science Foundation ARRA ARI Award No. 0963559.

Pacific Wave is supported by the National Science Foundation IRNC Award No. OCI-0962931.

StarLight receives support from the National Science Foundation, IRNC Award No. OCI-0962997 and ARRA ARI Award No. 0963095.

About CENIC

California’s education and research communities leverage their networking resources under CENIC, the Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California, in order to obtain cost-effective, high-bandwidth networking to support their missions and answer the needs of their faculty, staff, and students. CENIC designs, implements, and operates CalREN, the California Research and Education Network, a high-bandwidth, high-capacity Internet network specially designed to meet the unique requirements of these communities, and to which the vast majority of the state’s K-20 educational institutions are connected. In order to facilitate collaboration in education and research, CENIC also provides connectivity to non-California institutions and industry research organizations with which CENIC’s Associate researchers and educators are engaged. For more information, visit www.cenic.org.

About North Dakota State University (NDSU)

North Dakota State University is a student-focused, land-grant, research university — an economic engine that educates students, conducts primary research, creates new knowledge and advances technology. The university provides affordable access to an excellent education at a top-ranked research institution that combines teaching and research in a rich learning environment, educating future leaders who will create solutions to national and global challenges that will shape a better world. For more information, please visit http://www.ndsu.edu/.

About Pacific Northwest Gigapop (PNWGP)

The Pacific Northwest Gigapop is a nonprofit corporation serving research and education organizations throughout the Pacific Rim. They provide cost-effective, robust, reliable, high-bandwidth, and high-capacity networking to support the missions of these organizations and the needs of researchers, faculty, students, and staff. PNWGP designs, implements, and manages a multi-state high-bandwidth and high-capacity network specifically designed to meet unique requirements of research and education communities. For more information, please visit http://www.pnwgp.net/.

About StarLight

StarLight is the world’s most advanced national and international communications exchange facility. StarLight provides advanced networking services and technologies that are optimized for high-performance, large-scale metro, regional, national and global applications. With funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF), StarLight was designed and developed by researchers, for researchers. StarLight is managed by the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) at the University of Illinois at Chicago, the International Center for Advanced Internet Research (iCAIR) at Northwestern University, the Mathematics and Computer Science Division at Argonne National Laboratory, and Calit2 at University of California, San Diego, in partnership with Canada’s CANARIE national networking organization and The Netherlands’ SURFnet. (www.startap.net/starlight)

Today the North Dakota State University (NDSU) and Pacific Northwest Gigapop (PNWGP) announced “first light” on a new 10 Gbps optical connection between Seattle and Chicago called Northern Wave. Built using National Science Foundation (NSF) grant funds, Northern Wave will ultimately provide for a shared 10Gbps network for research and education institutions choosing to participate from Seattle to Chicago. The grant, part of NSF’s Academic Research Infrastructure program, funds the optical equipment to build the network along a fiber path provided by PNWGP (from Seattle to Minneapolis) and the BOREAS network (a collaboration among the Universities of Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin- Madison, and Iowa State University (www.boreas.net).

Ultimately, Northern Wave will connect to Pacific Wave (www.pacificwave.net) in Seattle and to StarLight (www.startap.net/starlight) in Chicago where a large number of international networks and universities choose to exchange networking traffic in very large, multi-gigabit flows. Researchers and educators in any connecting institution along the path in Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota, Montana, Idaho and Washington will have access to this 10Gbps pathway and exchange facility.

“Northern Wave brings a significant new capacity to network through improved communication facilities as well as easy exchange of data for initiating collaborations with other institutions. This is especially important for the establishment of large competitive research centers. It will also provide connectivity to large computational and visualization platforms at remote locations,” says Kalpana Katti, North Dakota State University Distinguished Professor of Civil Engineering and NSF CAREER Award grantee.

“Northern Wave puts into place a new piece of the cyberinfrastructure necessary for the complex interdisciplinary work that is on the cutting edge of science and technology,” said Amy Philipson, Executive Director, Pacific NorthWest Gigapop (PNWGP)

Once completed and operational, Northern Wave will enhance research and education network capabilities by seeking to increase network efficiency, reduce latency, increase throughput, and reduce costs; and will provide a state-of-the-art national and international peering exchange facility designed to serve researchers throughout this region by connecting them to research and education networks throughout the U.S., the Pacific Rim and the world.

About North Dakota State University
North Dakota State University is a student-focused, land-grant, research university — an economic engine that educates students, conducts primary research, creates new knowledge and advances technology. The university provides affordable access to an excellent education at a top-ranked research institution that combines teaching and research in a rich learning environment, educating future leaders who will create solutions to national and global challenges that will shape a better world. For more information, visit www.ndsu.edu.

About Pacific Northwest Gigapop
The Pacific Northwest Gigapop is a nonprofit corporation serving research and education organizations throughout the Pacific Rim. They provide cost-effective, robust, reliable, highbandwidth, and high-capacity networking to support the missions of these organizations and the needs of researchers, faculty, students, and staff. PNWGP designs, implements, and manages a multi-state high-bandwidth and high-capacity network specifically designed to meet unique requirements of research and education communities. For more information, visit www.pnwgigapop.net.

About Boreas
BOREAS is the Broadband Optical Research, Education and Sciences Network, a collaboration of four major research institutions in the upper Midwest: Iowa State University, the University of Iowa, the University of Minnesota, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. BOREAS operates a Regional Optical Network (RON) to service the advanced production and experimental network requirements of the research and education institutions in our region. For more information, visit www.boreas.net

About the StarLight Interational/National Communications Exchange Facility
The StarLight International/National Communications Exchange Facility provides advanced network services optimized for high-performance applications, especially data-intensive scientific research. StarLight provides high-performance multi-layer switching among participating networks, including true optical switching for wavelengths. StarLight is developed and managed by the the International Center for Advanced Internet Research (iCAIR) at Northwestern University, the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), and the Mathematics and Computer Science Division at ArgonneNational Laboratory, in partnership with Canada’s CANARIE and the Netherlands’ SURFnet. StarLight receives funding from the U.S. National Science Foundation. See www.startap.net/starlight.

Press Release also available in PDF Format.

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 R&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
WIDE, a research consortium working on practical research and development of Internet-related technologies, was launched in 1988. The Project has made a significant contribution to development of the Internet by collaborating with many other bodies – including 133 companies and 11 universities to carry out research in a wide range of fields, and by operating M.ROOT-SERVERS.NET, one of the DNS root servers, since 1997. WIDE Project also operates T-LEX (www.T-LEX.net/) as an effort of stewardship for the IEEAF Pacific link in Tokyo. Contact: (press@wide.ad.jp)

About SURFnet
SURFnet operates and innovates the National Research & Education Network
(NREN) in The Netherlands, connecting approximately 180 institutions with a
state-of-the-art hybrid network. SURFnet is one of the leading NREN
operators in the world. SURFnet is a founder and active participant in the
Global Lambda Integrated Facility (GLIF). SURFnet's NetherLight facility, a
GLIF Open Lightpath Exchange, or GOLE, located in Amsterdam, has been in
operation since 2002 and now interconnects over 100 Gbps of international
lightpaths. SURFnet contributes several 10Gbps lambdas to GLIF's emerging
global LambdaGrid, including one 10Gbps lambda to MAN LAN in New York and
one 10Gbps lambda to StarLight in Chicago. SURFnet is the European partner
of the NSF IRNC TransLight and CANARIE links to Europe, and serves as a
steward for the transatlantic IEEAF link. More information can be found at:
www.surfnet.nl/info/en/

About Pacific Wave and TransLight/Pacific Wave
Pacific Wave is a joint project between the Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California (CENIC) and the Pacific Northwest Gigapop (PNWGP), and is operated in collaboration with the University of Southern California and the University of Washington. Pacific Wave enhances research and education network capabilities by increasing network efficiency, reducing latency, increasing throughput, and reducing costs. The USA National Science Foundation provides support for PacificWave and research connectivity from the US West Coast to Australia through Hawaii in the “Translight/PacifcWave” award to the University of Southern California. Visit http://www.pacificwave.net and http://www.pacificwave.net/participants/irnc for more information.

About TransLight/StarLight
The USA National Science foundation’s International Research network connections (IRNC) “TransLight/StarLight” award to University of Illinois at Chicago provides two connections between the USA and Europe for production science: a routed connection that connects the pan-European GEANT2 to the USA Abilene and ESnet networks, and a switched connection that connects layer2 networks at StarLight in Chicago to similar networks at NetherLight in Amsterdam. TransLight/StarLight is part of the LambdaGrid fabric being created by participants of the Global Lambda Integrated Facility (GLIF).

About GLIF
The Global Lambda Integrated Facility (GLIF) is an international cooperative initiative to establish and coordinate a global-scale optical network to support scientific research. The GLIF network is based around a number of lambdas (dedicated high-capacity circuits based on optical wavelengths), contributed by the GLIF participants who own or lease them, and interconnected through a series of exchange points. These exchange points, known as GLIF Open Lightpath Exchanges or GOLEs, are usually also operated by GLIF participants, and are comprised of equipment that is capable of terminating transparent lambdas and performing light path switching. This way, different lambdas can be connected together, and end-to-end lightpaths established over them. More information is available on the GLIF website at http://www.glif.is/

National LambdaRail
National LambdaRail, Inc. (NLR) is a major initiative of U.S. research universities and private sector technology companies to provide a national scale infrastructure for research and experimentation in networking technologies and applications.  NLR puts the control, the power and the promise of experimental network infrastructure in the hands of our nation’s scientists and researchers.  Visit http://www.nlr.net for more information.

About IEEAF
The Internet Educational Equal Access Foundation (IEEAF) is a non-profit organization whose mission is to obtain donations of telecommunications capacity and equipment and make them available for use by the global research and education community. The IEEAF TransPacific Link provided by VSNL International connects Seattle and Tokyo at 10 Gbps transoceanic link; the IEEAF TransAtlantic Link, also provided by VSNL International, connects New York City and Groningen, The Netherlands. IEEAF donations currently span 17 time zones. http://www.ieeaf.org/

February 18, 2002

Key leaders in advanced networking announced today the formation of the Global Terabit Research Network (GTRN) - an international partnership to establish a true worldwide next generation Internet to interconnect national and multinational high-speed research and education networks. The partnership initially involves North America through Internet2 in the US and CANARIE in Canada, and Europe through the NREN Consortium. Participation of the Asia Pacific and other regions is expected soon.

"The scientific community is now truly international in just about all fields, and many vitally rely on the integration of computation, data, instruments and arrays of sensors that enable e-science," said Douglas Van Houweling, president and CEO of Internet2. "The GTRN will provide a framework in which the advanced networking community can collectively manage and provision the global scale, high-performance, persistent infrastructure required by the research and education community."

Added Fernando Liello, Chairman of the European NREN Consortium. "The GTRN will provide the connectivity and advanced Internet services needed by major multinational scientific collaborations in areas such as high energy physics, radio and optical astronomy, weather forecasting and climatology, biological sciences, and earth sciences."

Recent years have seen the creation of a number of very successful national and multinational advanced high-speed research networks such as the Internet2 Abilene network in the United States, the Canadian CA*net3 network in North America, and the pan-European GEANT network. Though these networks provide the bandwidth needed for e-science nationally and regionally, development of e-science on an international scale has been hampered by a lack of a global backbone comparable in speed and reliability to these networks.

The GTRN will provide a coherent global solution to this problem by providing a high-speed, stable, production-quality global backbone. This will allow next generation advanced Internet services to be provided to the global research and scientific community.

"Global availability of services such as quality of service, multicast and IPv6 are an important prerequisite for a truly converged and scalable global research network," said Andrew Bjerring - President and CEO of CANARIE Inc., Canada's advanced Internet development organization and a leader in the development, coordination and implementation of the national optical Internet network CA*net3. "Pervasive global access to applications such as reliable high quality video, telephony, remote instrument control, and numerous other applications that are incompatible with the current 'best efforts' IP networks requires that these advanced services be an integral part of a global research network."

"What has been seriously lacking is a true, persistent, production-quality global research and education network - one that is capable eventually of data rates of terabits per second", said Michael McRobbie, Vice President for Information Technology and CIO at Indiana University and Chair of Internet2's GTRN Committee. "The GTRN will provide this true global research network connectivity, offering the very high bandwidth connections that allow the national and regional networks to properly interconnect."

"All those involved in establishing the GTRN are to be congratulated on taking a major step forward in establishing the kind of advanced global network that is required by many international scientific research projects", said Aubrey Bush, Director of the Advanced Networking Infrastructure and Research Division in the National Science Foundation. "The NSF contributes funding to many of these projects and regards a stable world-wide research and education network that offers advanced services as being essential to them."

The GTRN will support global research and education requiring access to advanced high-performance Internet services. The GTRN will be run in a highly transparent manner so that end to end performance characteristics will be easily accessible to all parties responsible for ensuring the appropriate quality of service.

"The GTRN will provide both an application deployment infrastructure and a network testbed in support of advanced network services" said Dai Davies, General Manager of DANTE, which built and manages GEANT. "This will be an invaluable resource for the development of joint international research initiatives, such as grids of various types, as well as for joint network research initiatives."

The GTRN will consist of a global backbone initially connecting national and multinational networks in North America and Europe. Later it is expected to be expanded to Asia, Latin America, Russia, the Middle East and Africa. Access to the GTRN will be provided at a number of points of presence (GTRN Network Access Points - GNAPs).

The GTRN backbone will initially be composed of two OC-48 2.4 Gbit circuits acquired by DANTE connecting the Internet2 Abilene network and the CANARIE CA*net3 network to GEANT. These connect to the GEANT backbone in Europe at GNAPs in London and Frankfurt and to Abilene and CA*net3 in North America at the New York GNAP the GTRN partners have established. Additional high speed connections from North America to GEANT to complement those acquired by DANTE are being actively pursued, as are connections to other regions.

Internet2 will provide additional capacity on the Abilene network connecting the New York GNAP to Starlight in Chicago and to the Pacific Wave GigaPoP in Seattle to allow for the eventual connection of the Asia Pacific to the GTRN.

"StarLight is hosting experiments with dedicated end to end wavelengths coming from Holland, CERN, Canada, Illinois, Indiana, Washington, and California. Starlight will thus be a vital GNAP in the GTRN," said Tom DeFanti, Director of the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and principal investigator of the NSF Science, Technology And Research Transit Access Point (STAR TAP/StarLight). "The GTRN will connect Starlight and several other GNAPs in North America to several points on the GEANT network. As such the GTRN complements the StarLight wavelength experiments, offering a unified solution to connectivity between North America and Europe."

Ron Johnson, Vice President for Information Technology at the University of Washington responsible for Pacific Wave, commented "Pacific Wave is pre-positioned to be a key GNAP for integrating the Asia Pacific into the GTRN. Pacific Wave already has connections to, and selective ultra high-performance exchange among Japan, Australia, Canada and Taiwan network fabrics, and the GTRN is the next logical step in the development of connectivity across the Asia Pacific and evolution of a global teragrid."

These resources will form the initial GTRN backbone and Internet2, CANARIE and the European NREN Consortium have agreed to manage all these facilities in a coordinated and cooperative way. The Global Network Operations Center (GNOC) at Indiana University will provide NOC services to the GTRN as will the DANTE NOC and eventually a NOC in the Asia Pacific.

Related Links:

DANTE/GEANT (http://www.dante.net/)
Internet2 (http://www.internet2.edu)
CANARIE/CAnet3 (http://www.canarie.ca/)
NSF (http://www.nsf.gov/)
STAR TAP/Starlight (http://www.startap.net/starlight/)
Pacific Wave (http://pacificwave.net/)
Global NOC (http://globalnoc.iu.edu/)

Contacts:

Dai Davis (DANTE, dai.davies@dante.org.uk, +44-1223-302992)

Greg Wood (Internet2, ghwood@internet2.edu, 202-331-5360)

Susan Baldwin (CANARIE Inc., Susan.Baldwin@canarie.ca, 612-943-5399)

Karen Adams (Indiana University, kadams@indiana.edu, 812-856-5596)