The Network for Advanced Research and Innovation

NLR Chief Administrative and Financial Officer Kurt Snodgrass joined NLR TelePresence users Paradise Valley Unified School District and the Technical University of Kosice (Slovakia) sharing innovative examples of how educators are applying TelePresence today to broaden curriculum offerings, facilitate regional, national and international collaboration and reduce the cost and time required for physical travel. Kurt addressed the new, global TelePresence inter-network spanning more than 150 countries, made possible by the agreement between NLR and Tata Communications to link their respective TelePresence exchanges and those of British Telecom and Telefonica.

• The Globalization of the TelePresence Inter-Network (PDF - 1.13 MB)

NLR Board Chair and CENIC President/CEO Jim Dolgonas provided an update on NLR as part of a panel session on research and education networks. Other participants represented StateNets, the Quilt and Internet2.

• National LambdaRail: Community Update (PDF - 1.52 MB)

National LambdaRail (NLR) held its 2010 annual gathering of all of its member regional optical networks, major user organizations, partners and staff on the campus of Indiana University. Two featured guest speakers addressed developments in broadband on the national and state/community levels.

Presentations can be viewed at: http://www.nlr.net/ahm/index.php

NLR President and CEO Glenn Ricart presented at the Quilt/StateNets meeting on why NLR is well-suited to meet the long-term, low-cost, high-bandwidth needs of research, education and public service. NLR is different, according to Glenn, because NLR owns paid-for fiber IRUs and largely paid-for equipment. No Acceptable Use Policy means NLR allows for a wider range of services and retains a focus on integrating with and serving RONs.

• The Quilt / StateNets (PDF - 1.52 MB)

NLR President and CEO Glenn Ricart shared why NLR is a strategic, national asset. NLR, as a community-owned network with paid-for fiber and equipment, is able to pass on technology cost savings to its users. With no Acceptable Usage Policy as imposed by commercial carriers, NLR offers unrestricted usage and can also be used to support economic development activities. NLR's technical expertise and project support is tailored to the needs of the research and education community, and its financials are solid with no debt. As a result of these many factors, NLR is uniquely able to provide high bandwidth at a reasonable cost, thus ensuring that advanced research, education and public service are able to control their own destiny.

• Education and Research Network Futures (PDF - 810 KB)

At NLR's SC09 booth, via Cisco TelePresence from Chapel Hill, North Carolina, RENCI senior networking researcher Yufeng Xin talked about the joint RENCI-Duke University project to adapt Duke's ORCA distributed resource allocation architecture, originally developed by Duke professor Jeff Chase, to the needs of GENI by applying it to the BEN (Breakable Experimental Network). In its first year, the joint team has successfully demonstrated the ability of ORCA to create complex 'slices' of the substrate, which included virtual machines, static backbone links over NLR and multi-layered (fiber/DWDM/VLAN) connections across BEN.

• ORCA-BEN: a joint RENCI/Duke GENI project (PDF - 1.2 MB)

At NLR's SC09 booth, Tom DeFanti, research scientist at the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) at the University of California San Diego, gave an update on the GreenLight Project, the first initiative to focus on the fast-growing energy use of departmental computer clusters. Unfortunately almost nothing is known about how to make these shared virtual clusters energy efficient. Project GreenLight is developing ways of providing users with information on energy use of various types of computing clusters and coming up with ways to optimize the work per watt, such as through energy-saving hardware acceleration, reducing DC/AC/DC conversion losses and investigating WAN terrestrial and undersea transmission options. NLR and NLR member CENIC provide 5 x 10Gbps WAN and campus network links for Project GreenLight.

• GreenLight Extended to Networks (PDF - 1.22 MB)

Board Director Ron Hutchins shares recent developments at NLR and how NLR is removing technical and cost barriers to the inter-networked university or college.

• NLRUpdate Educause (PDF - 2.63 MB)

NASCIO Annual Conference
October 27, 2009

NLR Board Chair Kurt Snodgrass spoke at the Annual Conference of the National Association of State CIOs on a panel on the topic of States and Broadband: A Fast-Moving Train of Opportunities. This is the NLR Overview presentation made available to NASCIO participants.

• NLR NASCIO AnnualConference (PDF - 2.85 MB)

Tom West gives keynote at QUESTnet, Australia's premier research and education networking conference, in Gold Coast, Australia

• QUESTnet Tom West July 08 2009 (PDF - 5.70 MB)

A Town Hall
June 8, 2009

Grover Browning shares NLR's view of evolving network requirements at Future of the Internet: Access, Openness and Inclusion -- A Town Hall, Toronto

• Future Internet Grover Browning June 2009 (PDF - 3.01 MB)

All Hands Meeting
March 24, 2009

• Engineering (PDF - 1.10 MB)
• GENI Update (PDF - 23.2 KB)
• NLR Layer 1 Availability Statistics (PDF - 198 KB)
• OpenCloudConsortium RobertGrossman (PDF - 1.46 MB)
• ProjectGreenlight TomDeFantiCalit2 (PDF - 2.41 MB)
• Quilt-OpenFlow-Overview (PDF - 756 KB)
• SuperComputing09 (PDF - 167 KB)
• TelePresence and You (PDF - 41 KB)