SCD's Marla Meehl and Peter O'Neil point out the location of UCAR and the Front Range GigaPoP on the National LambdaRail fiber-optic network.

Photo: Fabian Guerrero, NCAR/SCD

The network of the future

The hard work of Marla Meehl, manager of SCD's Network Engineering and Telecommunications Section, and Peter O'Neil (NETS), a NETS senior engineer, paid off in June 2004 when UCAR joined the National LambdaRail (NLR) on behalf of the Front Range GigaPop (FRGP).

NLR is a consortium of leading U.S. research universities and private-sector technology companies deploying a nationwide networking infrastructure, while the FRGP is a consortium of universities, nonprofit corporations, and government agencies that share Wide Area Network services along the Colorado Front Range, Wyoming, and Utah.

NLR's leading-edge fiber-optic technology will support scientific research as well as the development of new Internet applications and services. The increased flexibility and capacity of the network will enable the NCAR community to link models and move data faster and more reliably on dedicated lines.

Marla and Peter championed the effort to bring UCAR and the FRGP into the NLR, working for two years to develop a solution that would be viable financially, practically, and legally for the many organizations involved.

Their labor bore fruit when UCAR/FRGP joined the fiber-optic network in June, along with Cornell University, the Louisiana Board of Regents, the Oklahoma State Board of Regents; the Texas Lonestar Education and Research Network, and the University of New Mexico. Other members of the NLR network include the Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California, the Pacific Northwest GigaPop, Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, Duke University, the Mid-Atlantic Terascale Partnership, Virginia Tech Foundation, Cisco Systems, Internet2, Florida LambdaRail, Georgia Institute of Technology, and the Committee on Institutional Cooperation.

"Universities and scientific organizations, working together, have achieved a high-performance, experimental network infrastructure that will enable scientific discovery on many fronts," says Marla, noting that NLR will be an important resource for NCAR's atmospheric sciences community.

For details, see:

• SCD works to bring UCAR and Front Range GigaPoP into National LambdaRail
• UCAR joins National Lambda Rail
• National LambdaRail Web site