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The network as of October 2005.

National LambdaRail is a high-speed national computer network in the United States that runs over fiber-optic lines, and is the first transcontinental Ethernet network. The name is shared by the organization of research institutions that developed the network, and, to date, plans to continue developing it. LambdaRail is similar to the Abilene Network, but LambdaRail permits deeper experimentation than Abilene does.

It is primarily oriented to aid terascale computing efforts, but is also not intended to be a service network, but to be used as a network testbed for experimentation with next-generation large-scale networks. National LambdaRail is a university-based and -owned initiative, in contrast with Abilene and Internet2, which are university-corporate sponsorships. This gives universities more control to use the network for these research projects.

Links in the network use dense wavelength-division multiplexing (DWDM), which allows up to 32 or 40 individual optical wavelengths to be used (depending on hardware configuration at each end). At present, individual wavelengths are used to carry a 10-gigabit Ethernet signal, although other systems such as SONET may also be used in the future.

Duke University's Chief Information Officer Tracy Futhey is the Chair of the LambdaRail Board of Directors. In 2004, LambdaRail completed its first main "phase".

The goals of the National LambdaRail project are:

• To bridge the gap between leading-edge optical network research and state-of-the-art applications research;
• To push beyond the technical and performance limitations of today’s Internet backbones;
• To provide the growing set of major computationally-intensive science (often termed e-Science) projects, initiatives and experiments with the dedicated bandwidth, deterministic performance characteristics, and/or other advanced network capabilities they need; and
• To enable and to rekindle the possibilities for highly creative, out-of-the-box experimentation and innovation that characterized facilities-based network research during the early years of the Internet.

The following is a list, from the official LambdaRail web site, of LambdaRail "members and associates". The list is apparently in no particular order.

• Case Western Reserve University [1]
• Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California [2] CENIC
• Pacific Northwest GigaPop [3]
• Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center [4]
• Duke University
• Mid-Atlantic Terascale Partnership [5] through the Virginia Tech Foundation
• Cisco Systems, Inc.
• Internet2
• Florida LambdaRail, LLC [6]
• Georgia Institute of Technology
• Committee on Institutional Cooperation
• Cornell University
• Louisiana Board of Regents
• Oklahoma State Board of Regents
• Lonestar Education and Research Network
• University of New Mexico
• FrontRange GigaPop & University Corporation for Atmospheric Research
• Pennsylvania State University (New participant) Video Presentation

• National LambdaRail