Cornell has joined a nation-wide consortium that owns and operates a fiber-optic networking infrastructure for scientific computer communication. The action, announced in June, will provide the university's researchers with unprecedented high-speed connections and will allow other upstate New York institutions to invest in and join the system.

Cornell has pledged to contribute $1 million immediately to the consortium, National LambdaRail (NLR), and another $4 million over the next four years. The funding will enable NLR to extend its existing cross-country network of optical fiber to New York City. Cornell will complete the network by leasing fiber from Ithaca to New York City, also allowing more efficient collaboration between the Ithaca campus and the Weill Cornell Medical College in Manhattan.

"The trains don't come to Ithaca anymore, but this guarantees that there will be a stop in Ithaca on the new information railroad," said Cornell Vice Provost for Research Robert Richardson, the F.R. Newman Professor of Physics. "I expect it to have a major impact on categories of Cornell research that depend on collaborations in which we exchange large quantities of data." Such research might include particle physics, astrophysics, and biosystematics.

NLR is a consortium of leading U.S. research universities and private-sector technology companies deploying a nation-wide networking infrastructure to support research in science, engineering, health care, and education, as well as the research and development of new Internet technologies, protocols, applications, and services. Cornell will be its first member in the Northeast and will have a seat on the NLR board of directors. Richardson said.

NLR represents a major step forward in research computer communication because it owns its "dark fiber" and owns and operates the hardware that "lights" the fiber with signals, rather than simply buying bandwidth on commercial networks.

Founding NLR members include the Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California; Pacific Northwest GigaPop; the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, Duke University, representing a coalition of North Carolina universities; the Mid-Atlantic Terascale Partnership and the Virginia Tech Foundation; Cisco Systems; Internet2; Florida LambdaRail; Georgia Institute of Technology; and the Committee on Institutional Cooperation.

—Bill Steele, Cornell News Service