Yesterday’s announcement that ESNet is buying into the National LambdaRail as its backbone provider of the future is excellent news, but not exactly a surprise. More than ever, national laboratories and academic research communities need to collaborate, and making sure that they share a common network fabric in the future will certainly help facilitate that. This hookup has been coming for a while, though. Suggestions in this direction have been showing up in DOE slideshows since 2002 at least. The DOE Network Roadmap (late 2003) notes that “As NLR evolves, it will be important for ESnet to interface with the services running on NLR, as many of the users of Office of Science facilities are located at universities, and these users will use these high end services as their method of moving terabyte/petabyte-scale volumes of data to and from ESnet.” Bill Johnston’s reviews of ESNet in early 2004 (e.g. here) make connecting ESNet and NLR a critical near term goal. As usual, big data sets (e.g. LHC experiments at CERN) pull this train.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 16th, 2005 at 11:33 am and is filed under Networking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.