Fast Track for Science Data 

The first leg of an ultra-high-performance network will go live this week in what its backers call the most important networking experiment since Arpanet, the military network that laid the foundation for the Internet.

The National LambdaRail is the biggest, fastest network ever undertaken for scientific research.

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Created by a private consortium of universities and tech companies, the NLR will link hundreds of research institutions around the United States with a dedicated, high-speed optical network.

The first leg will go live on Monday, linking Chicago's TeraGrid facility and the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center. The remainder of the network will be up and running by the end of 2004.

"This is an experimental network that may or may not be the next Internet," said Ron Johnson, an NLR board member and CIO/CTO at the University of Washington in Seattle. "This is a new radical thing.... We're trying to get back to what we were doing in the '70s, which is to re-invigorate experimentation."

The NLR is being created from 10,000 miles of unused, or "dark," optic cable on the country's backbone network. The project plans to use about 40 channels, or wavelengths, each capable of transmitting 10 billion bits a second (10 Gbps).

"Projects such as this are essential to both the future health of the computer and communications industry, as well as ... our industrial base," said David Farber, a Carnegie Mellon University computer science professor.

Using a railway analogy, Johnson said the NLR is akin to a high-speed Maglev rail network running alongside the standard rail network. Whereas Internet traffic is like a bunch of box cars being shunted around branch lines and rail yards, the NLR will be high-speed tracks end to end, free from congestion or interruption.

Johnson said that the railway analogy is so apt, the project initially was to be named the "National LightRail." However, the name is trademarked, and the project opted instead for lambda -- the Greek letter used to symbolize wavelength.

Johnson said though the NLR will have a number of uses, it is a first step toward the kind of high-speed networks necessary to support the coming era of "e-science."

Many scientific disciplines -- from astronomy to genomics -- are embarking on big ambitious projects driven by the incredible power of computers. The Sloan Digital Sky Survey, a 3-D map of the entire heavens, and the human genome project are just two examples.

These projects generate vast amounts of data, which is often marooned at various institutions because the network connections aren't fast enough to grant quick and easy access from a distance.

"The amounts of calculation and the quantities of information that can be stored, transmitted and used are exploding at a stunning, almost disruptive rate," said a National Science Foundation report on cyberinfrastructure published in January. "Powerful data-mining techniques operating across huge sets of multidimensional data open new approaches to discovery. Global networks can link all these together and support more interactivity and broader collaboration."

The NLR is a first step toward these "global networks," Johnson said.

"We're going to have some truly extraordinary discoveries and data-mining capabilities, but we need these kinds of network connections to allow the scientists to trawl through these enormous amounts of data," Johnson said.

One of the first goals will be implementing 10-Gb ethernet across the entire system. Tom West, NLR's CEO, said ethernet will allow scientists to plug their computers into the network as easily as plugging a PC into an office network.

"Too much of the time, the problem has been getting the connections," West said. "If someone in Berkeley wants to work with someone in San Diego, they don't have to waste time figuring out how to get connected."

Johnson said the NLR will also enable "extreme multimedia," such as "real telepresence" or the ability to videoconference at HDTV quality -- a billion bits per second. Instead of using a jerky webcam, scientists on different continents could communicate using HDTV.

"It would be like talking to each other in the hallway," Johnson said.

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More stories written by Leander Kahney