Global optical networking

Signal, Feb 2002

A new network-research facility is providing high-speed connections for U.S. researchers to communicate with colleagues abroad. StarLight, which stands for science technology and research light-illuminated gigabit highperformance transit, uses the latest optical technology to achieve speeds of 2.5 billion bits per second, with 10 gigabits expected by spring 2002.

StarLight uses both electronic and optical switches to manage the individual wavelengths of existing local, national and international fiber optic bandwidth. It supports the networking equivalent of a 10,000-lane highway. The result is a stable resource for scientists and engineers worldwide and a laboratory for researchers who study advanced networking itself.

The project is a collaboration of the University of Illinois at Chicago, Northwestern University and the Argonne National Laboratory, with funding from the National Science Foundation, or NSF (www.nsf.gov). The StarLight research facility will host connections to the world's most advanced multisite computing system, called TeraGrid. NSF awarded the contract for the TeraGrid project in August 2001 to a team from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, University of California at San Diego, California Institute of Technology and Argonne.