National LambdaRail, Inc. aims beyond Internet 2

National LambdaRail, Inc. aims beyond Internet 2

On September 16, a consortium of US universities and private sector technology Companies announced plans to create a new national networking infrastructure designed to foster the next generation of network-based applications in science, engineering and medicine. The new initiative—baptized National LambdaRail, Inc.—will support both application level and networking level experiments. The infrastructure design will incorporate advanced network flexibility and enhanced technical support in allow multiple large-scale experiments to run on the same infrastructure and enable researchers to deploy and control dedicated test-beds.

The LambdaRail consortium includes a coalition of North Carolina universities and research institutes, the Corporation for Education Network Initiatives, the Pacific Northwest Gigapop, the Mid-Atlantic Terascale Partnership, the Virginia Tech Foundation, the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, Cisco Systems, Internet2(r), the Georgia Institute of Technology, Florida LambdaRail a consortium of the Big Ten Universities, and the University of Chicago. NLR is seeking additional corporate participation as well as collaboration with federal research agencies.