The California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) 
is an academic research institution run jointly by the University of California, San Diego and the University of California, Irvine. Calit2 relies on advanced networking services from NLR and NLR member CENIC for its ambitious projects.
For instance, for OptIPuter, which pioneered the use of optical networks as "backplanes" for world-sized computers, Calit2 used dedicated, high-capacity NLR circuits to link research teams in California to OptIPuter/OptIPortal locations across the U.S. and worldwide. Many of these circuits continue in use today. They and additional network connections are providing cyber-infrastructure for advanced visualization and collaboration activities as well as other major projects.
Calit2's Project GreenLight , which is exploring how to build a fully instrumented green compute facility, uses multiple campus 10Gbps links as well as 5x10Gbps WAN connections supported by NLR infrastructure. And CAMERA , the Community Cyberinfrastructure for Advanced Marine Microbial Ecology Research and Analysis, uses NLR's infrastructure for sharing and analyzing vast amounts of marine genome data.
Recently, Project GreenLight started a collaboration with the Canadian Canarie -based GreenStar Project, and is providing DC powered server resources to the Canadian GreenStar infrastructure, which collectively supports the dynamic migration of processes and virtual machines in efforts to optimize energy efficiency (a GreenLight goal) along with the ability to maximize the usage of renewable energy resources, a GreenStar goal. Together, the collaborators are developing a "follow the sun and wind" computing paradigm which will maximize the usage of energy efficient and renewable energy-based computational resources. Part of this collaboration includes real-time awareness of the "greenness" of computational and communications resources, dependent upon calculations of real-time power quality, type and consumption of computing and networking equipment across the GreenStar network's reach.
Calit2 along with the Naval Postgraduate School, University of Southern California and San Francisco State University, is also a participant in CineGrid , the international organization dedicated to high-quality digital media over advanced optical networks. CineGrid, funded in part by the NSF, uses several 10gb/s connections between Chicago and California, namely the CAVEwave and Cisco's C-Waves, all deployed over NLR.