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National LambdaRail 2007 Mid-Year Update

2007 has been a busy and productive year for NLR, and it is only half over! NLR is working towards the merger of Internet2 and NLR, but it continues to proudly serve the members of the research and education communities.

In the first half of 2007, NLR put new circuits in production, established new peering points, supported some groundbreaking projects and participated in the FCC Rural Health Care Pilot Program. NLR is also planning for SC07 support. Read on for details of what NLR has been up to, and as always, check out the NLR website (http://www.nlr.net) for the most current information.  

New Circuits

January 23: ESnet has a new 10GE circuit in production from StarLight to Washington, D.C.

February 21: Three TransitRail circuits that ride the NLR Layer 1 infrastructure are up and in production. These run from Sunnyvale to Seattle, Seattle to Chicago, and Chicago to Washington D.C.

March 14: NASA has a new 10GE circuit in production from Atlanta to Washington, D.C.

May 3: LEARN has a new 10GE circuit in production from El Paso to San Antonio.

May 23: Cisco has four new 10GE circuits up in production for their Cisco Research Wave program. They are Los Angeles to Seattle, Seattle to Sunnyvale, Los Angeles to Sunnyvale and Sunnyvale to Seattle.

Peering Points

February 1: The pan-European Research and Education GÉANT network completes peering with NLR PacketNet at MANLAN for IPv4 and IPv6.

February 1: Singapore Research and Education network SingaREN completes peering with NLR Packetnet through PacWave-LA, supporting both IPv4 and IPv6.

March 21: A PacketNet connection is operational with the CLARA network through the MANLAN exchange point and AtlanticWave, ultimately to Brazil. IPv4 unicast, IPv4 multicast and IPv6 unicast are all now available.

March 28: Peering between NLR PacketNet and the AMPATH exchange point router in Miami through MANLAN and AtlanticWave is up. AMPATH brings routes from Brazil, Chili, Venezuela, Ecuador, Argentina, Peru and Puerto Rico to NLR.

April 17: In addition to peerings at Starlight in Chicago and MANLAN in New York City, ESnet has established peering with NLR in Seattle at PacWave. This additional peering improves performance for NLR members in the western United States.

Projects

NOAA Weather Forecasting Experiment: NOAA (the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) mounted an unprecedented experiment in forecasting severe storms. NLR, in conjunction with the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC), OneNet and a donation by Cisco Systems, is providing a dedicated lambda for NOAA Hazardous Weather Testbed (HWT) resources. The dedicated lambda makes possible the transfer of 2.6 terabytes of data per forecast day.

A major goal of the 2007 HWT Spring Experiment is to assess how well "ensemble" forecasting -- a very computationally demanding approach -- works to predict thunderstorms, including the "supercells" that spawn tornados. Ensemble forecasts are multiple runs of the same forecast model to measure the uncertainty inherent in weather forecasts. It is the first time these forecasts are being carried out in real-time and at the spatial resolution at which storms occur.

LSU HD Class: Broadcasting over NLR via EnLIGHTened, LONI and OK/OneNet, LSU Center for Computation & Technology (CCT) computer science professor Thomas Sterling offered a High Performance Computing course enabled by advanced, Internet-based video technologies. This marked the first-time use of a high-definition video broadcast via the Internet for distributed classroom instruction and allowed students to participate from multiple locales. Classrooms in Louisiana, North Carolina, Arkansas, and the Czech Republic were all in attendance.

The first semester has now ended and there are plans underway to repeat this course in the Spring 2008 semester, adding additional receiving sites. This was a great success and the ESS plans to follow up with the CCT team to see if they have an evaluation of the technologies and lessons learned that can be shared with the community.

FCC Rural Health Care Pilot Program

On February 7, 2007, the Federal Communication Commission (FCC) announced that it had expanded the eligibility for its Rural Health Care Pilot Program (RHCPP) to include NLR's backbone.

Shortly after this eligibility announcement was made, NLR began receiving inquiries from health care entities and providers about using NLR to participation in the FCC RHCPP. NLR ESS staff worked with these health care entities to help them understand NLR's offerings and services, provide pricing information, and answer any questions they had. Several NLR members also worked directly with rural health care initiatives in their areas on their submissions. NLR received inquiries from, or information about, possible RHCPP programs that want to use NLR from all regions of the country. Eight of these projects requested, and received, a letter of support from NLR to accompany their RHCPP proposal.

By the  May 7, 2007 FCC submission deadline, more than 70 RHCPP proposals had been submitted. NLR ESS staff is reviewing the public proposals for possible additional opportunities for NLR collaboration and will refer them to the appropriate NLR member.

SC07

NLR will be providing similar services to those provided for SC06 -- 4 10GE waves for the provisioning and scheduling of FrameNet and PacketNet services:

ESS has surveyed the community for an idea of commitment to utilize NLR infrastructure for SC07, and for estimates of their bandwidth requirements at this time. ESS has received responses back from 19 projects (14 universities/organizations) of intent to use NLR for the show along with their anticipated bandwidth needs.  This information has been documented and distributed to the technical support team within NLR and will be distributed to SCinet. Next steps include providing online information detailing NLR’s services and topology for this years show and to beginning the process of working directly with groups to understand their applications and requirements.