FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
February 28, 2006

Contact: Eric Gerber
713.743.8189 (office)
713.617.7130(pager)
egerber@uh.edu

AUSTIN, Texas – Feb. 28, 2006 – The Lonestar Education and Research Network (LEARN) announced that National LambdaRail (NLR), a consortium of leading U.S. research universities, state and regional consortia like LEARN, and private technology companies, has deployed a state-of-the art national fiber optic network for research and education.

The high-speed national computer network operates over fiber-optic cable and is the first transcontinental Ethernet network. While NLR is similar to the Internet’s Abilene Network, NLR allows more complex experimentation.

In the Houston area, Baylor College of Medicine, M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, Rice University, Texas A&M–College Station, the University of Houston, and the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston are members of the LEARN and NLR network.

A major goal of NLR is to test large-scale, next generation Internets. It also seeks to support some of the largest computing efforts ever undertaken.

By participating with NLR, Texas’ LEARN gains access to NLR’s ultra high-speed optical network, and its sophisticated connecting points in Houston, Dallas, El Paso, and San Antonio. Unlike LEARN, NLR covers the domestic United States and thus makes it possible for Texas-based researchers to link to other North American regional research networks as well as international networks.

“The new computing and network infrastructure will provide our faculty and researchers with the opportunity to collaborate on cutting edge research and will further propel innovation in sciences, engineering and technology,” according to Kamran Khan, vice provost for information technology and chair of the South East Texas GigaPOP, which provides a high speed network aggregation point for diverse institutions in Houston and nearby areas.

“Texas and Houston now have access to a world class research network infrastructure,” explained Dennis Fouty, chief information officer for the UH System and for UH. He said the network will enable major research collaborations by interconnecting some of the highest performing supercomputers.

To extend the national network’s reach, LEARN is building a 2,100-mile network that will provide connection points for member universities in 13 cities across the state. A key component of the LEARN network, a link between El Paso and San Antonio, will be developed using the underlying NLR fiber optic infrastructure.

NLR provides researchers unprecedented access to and control over a nationwide fiber optic infrastructure with up to 40 individual light paths—each of which can transmit data at 10 gigabits per second and can be used to deploy experimental networks as well as vastly improved network services widely accessible by those in academia and research.

The NLR infrastructure is the result of more than three years of work and nearly $100 million in funding by members. Those who financed the network own the infrastructure, which permits vastly expanded research into questions about Internet technology.

Universities in the LEARN consortium committed $5M over five years of work to the NLR initiative. With the assistance of a $7.3M grant from the Texas Enterprise Fund, LEARN is building an analogous network to support research and education in the state.

“Through the collaborative efforts of the 33 LEARN member organizations, Texas scholars and researchers will have access to advanced networked resources across the nation and globe,” said LEARN Executive Director Jim Williams. “Once we complete our initial network later this year, we’ll have it as good as it gets.”

"The fully operational National LambdaRail marks an unprecedented milestone for the U.S. research community," said Tracy Futhey, NLR board chair, and chief information officer at Duke University. "For the first time, a nationwide networking infrastructure is owned and operated by the research and education community, giving scientists flexible access to advanced networking capabilities and enabling experiments and collaborations across geographic barriers."

Texas Academic and Research institutions stand to greatly benefit from the linkage between LEARN and NLR, said Lennart Johnsson, director of the Texas Learning and Computation Center and Cullen Distinguished Professor of Computer Science, Mathematics and Electrical and Computer Engineering at UH. This new optical network will enhance the ability of scientists and students in Texas to collaborate and share data and computational resources with each other and with colleagues nationally and globally. As traditionally has been the case, science and engineering disciplines are early beneficiaries of this type of technology but life sciences and medicine are catching up and are soon expected to become major beneficiaries as are environmental and energy studies, he explained. A concrete example is the need in the high-energy physics community to share data from the world’s largest accelerator in Geneva that will produce the equivalent of more than two million CDs of data every year starting next year. Data sharing at this level would not be possible without this new network.

"This new high performance infrastructure will provide significant opportunities not only for Baylor College of Medicine but also for our neighbor organizations in the Texas Medical Center in the advancement of medical education, research, and leading edge patient care," said Jenifer Jarriel, vice president of information technology and chief information officer for Baylor College of Medicine.

NLR's WaveNet, FrameNet, and PacketNet services are already in use in more than a dozen cutting-edge research projects, including:

The National Science Foundation-supported OptIPuter projects; the U.S. Department of Energy’s UltraScience Net project; CENIC and the Pacific Northwest GigaPOP’s Pacific Wave project; the CAMERA project (Community Cyberinfrastructure for Advanced Marine Microbial Ecology Research and Analysis) led by CalIT2, the Venter Institute and the University of California, San Diego’s Center for Earth Observations & Applications (CEOA); The University of Virginia-led CHEETAH project (Circuit-switched High-Speed End-to-End Transport Architecture); and Internet2’s HOPI project (Hybrid Optical Packet Infrastructure).

The first use of NLR in Texas involves a 10 Gbps connection to Chicago for the Texas Advanced Computing Center at UT Austin, between the Texas Advanced Computing Center at UT Austin and the NSF TeraGrid point of presence in Chicago.

“The completion of NLR is great news for researchers in Texas,” said Dan Updegrove, LEARN Board chair, NLR vice chair, and vice president for information technology at UT Austin.

About LEARN
The Lonestar Education and Research Network (LEARN) is a cooperative effort of 33 Texas institutions of higher education to provide high-speed connectivity between their institutions and to research networks across the country. Such linkages support higher education's research, teaching, health care, and public
service missions. For more on LEARN go to http://www.tx-learn.net.

About National LambdaRail
National LambdaRail, Inc. (NLR) offers 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.

For more information about UH visit the university’s ‘Newsroom’ at www.uh.edu/admin/media/newsroom.