For Researchers
NLR Community
Composition
NLR is a membership-based organization with 15 Members and several Associates that include over 150 universities, research institutions and other organizations. As illustrated in Figure 1, the NLR infrastructure has nodes located in 28 cities. NLR’s core set of basic services are offered from these nodes and then distributed regionally by its Members and Associates. A list of the current NLR Members and Associates and their participants is provided in Appendix A.
This list is updated on a regular basis to reflect the NLR’s membership. In some instances a specific site or region of interest to a researcher may not be listed in the appendix. If this is the case, the NLR support staff reachable at noc@nlr.net or by following the Direct Contact procedures outlined in Section 3.2.2 below, can often provide additional information.
End-to-End Model
For almost all of the NLR services described on the next page, NLR provides the national backbone, or wide-area network component, of an end-to-end service with an NLR Member or Associate organization providing or coordinating the regional component and an individual institution the local component. The Related Links page provides a list of the services currently supported by the NLR Members and Associates as well as their members. This list is updated on a regular basis in order to reflect the expansion of services members, and associated organizations and institutions.
While NLR does not provide the regional components of its service, it is able to facilitate the entire connection either through providing contacts for each end site or through providing the coordination necessary to implement the entire path.
The members list shows the Administrative and Technical Contact information for each of the NLR Members. These contacts can provide additional technical and cost information for the regional components of the services. The NLR Service Desk and Experiment Support Service group can provide support for a researcher who would like NLR’s help in coordinating the end-to-end path. Both groups are easily reachable by sending email to noc@nlr.net.