NetherLight, located at the Amsterdam Internet Exchange facility on the campus of the Amsterdam Science & Technology Centre, is an advanced optical infrastructure and proving ground for network services optimized for high-performance applications. Operational since summer 2001, NetherLight is a multiple Gigabit Ethernet (GigE) switching facility for high-performance access to participating networks and will ultimately become a pure lambda switching facility for wavelength circuits, as optical technologies and their control planes mature. NetherLight's international connectivity includes dedicated lambdas to the StarLight facility in Chicago and to CERN in Switzerland. On a national scale, SURFnet connects ASTRON/ JIVE in the region of Dwingeloo in northern Holland (ASTRON is the Netherlands' Foundation for research in astronomy and JIVE is the Joint Institute for VLBI [Very Long Baseline Interferometry] in Europe) to NetherLight by means of a 32-wavelength Dense Wave Division Multiplexing (DWDM) transport network.
Researchers use the NetherLight facility to investigate novel concepts of optical bandwidth provisioning and to gain experience with these techniques. In particular, researchers are investigating different scenarios on how lambdas can be used to provide tailored network performance for demanding grid applications. Important issues are: how to get traffic onto and out of lambdas; how to map load on the network to a map of lambdas; how to deal with lambdas at peering points; how to deal with provisioning when more administrative domains are involved; and, how to do fine-grain, near-real-time grid application-level lambda provisioning.
NetherLight has been realised by SURFnet, the Dutch Research Network organization, within the context of GigaPort, the Dutch Next Generation Internet project.
www.science.uva.nl/~delaat/optical
www.surfnet.nl
StarLight, the optical STAR TAP initiative, is a persistent infrastructure that supports advanced applications and middleware research, and aggressive advanced networking services. StarLight is a multi-vendor 1Gbps, 2.5Gbps, and 10Gbps experimental switching facility, serving as a nodal point for the other end, or switching hub, for national and international experiments. StarLight will ultimately become an anchor for wavelength-rich LambdaGrids, with switching and routing at the highest experimental levels, laying the foundation for fully optical switching.
StarLight is a networking, database, visualization and computing research support facility planned by researchers for researchers. It is a middleware, protocol, and network measurement and monitoring research environment for applications, focusing on developing and testing methods for high-performance application provisioning on optical networks. It serves researchers using IP-over-lambda networks, addressing restoration issues, building LambdaGrids, optimizing DNS services, and testing novel protocols for long, very-high-bandwidth connections.
StarLight serves e-Science researchers who have spent the past 1.5 years helping design it. These include the technical leaders of USA research efforts, academic research and education networks, next-generation Federal networks, major state initiatives, MetaPoPs, metro initiatives, and international research and education networks.
StarLight is being developed by the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), the International Center for Advanced Internet Research at Northwestern University, and the Mathematics and Computer Science Division at Argonne National Laboratory (ANL), in partnership with Canada's CANARIE and Holland's SURFnet. STAR TAP and StarLight are made possible by major funding from the USA National Science Foundation to UIC (awards ANI-9980480 and ANI-9730202) and USA Dept. of Energy funding to ANL.
iGrid's enabling technology is a 2.5Gbps experimental network provided by SURFnet, the Dutch Research Network organization, which connects the NetherLight facility in Amsterdam to StarLight, a USA National Science Foundation-supported facility in Chicago. This very-high-speed transoceanic optical network between Europe and the USA is the first multi-gigabit link for use by the advanced scientific and engineering research community. Level 3 Communications, Inc., the wavelength service provider, graciously donated an additional, full 10Gbps transoceanic wavelength, from StarLight to NetherLight, for the benefit of iGrid 2002.
The USA's Internet2 Abilene 10Gbps network, the European Union's DataTAG 2.5Gbps network, and Canada's CA*net4 multi-gigabit network connect to StarLight, as do other networks from Europe, Asia and South America. In Europe, SURFnet provides a 2.5Gbps link from NetherLight to CERN. In the USA, Abilene's New York City Point of Presence (PoP) is connected to NetherLight via a 10Gbps wavelength provisioned by Tyco Telecom through the Internet Educational Equal Access Foundation (IEEAF).
The iGrid 2002 LAN is a dedicated network built with Cisco equipment. The LAN's central router is a Cisco 6509 router/switch that is connected to the SURFnet backbone via 10GigE for IPv4 and 1GigE for IPv6. The SURFnet backbone router, a Cisco 12416, uses the new Ashara 10GigE linecard.
A second Cisco 6509 is installed in the conference's main demo room for switching purposes. It is connected to the central router at 10GigE as well. To provide connectivity to the smaller conference rooms, switching equipment (a Cisco 4006 and Cisco 3524) is used, interconnected at GigE. The conference also supports wireless local-area networking (WLAN).