This proposal describes an engineered solution to providing high capacity, high performance, leading-edge network services between the U.S. and Europe. Specifically, connections are proposed connecting Chicago, New York, and Amsterdam. The proposal leverages existing partnerships with SURFnet in the Netherlands and expertise and experience from years of engineering and running the StarLight facility in providing in this proposal production-level international network connection services spanning the IP layer through "wavelength" services at Layer 1. The StarLight facility in Chicago is used, as is the new ManLan facility in New York City.
The NSF International Research Network Connections’ (IRNC) TransLight/StarLight award funded the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) to provide U.S. researchers and educators with excellent network connectivity to their collaborators and associates in Europe and beyond. Today’s scientists and educators have persistent, large-flow, real-time, application requirements that need the most advanced networking technologies available. Who else better to understand those needs and to work with telcos to provide connectivity than researchers themselves? The goals of the IRNC program in general, and TransLight/StarLight specifically, have been to: (1) fund international network links between U.S. and foreign science and engineering communities; (2) encourage the use of advanced architectures; (3) support advanced science and engineering requirements; (4) encourage the development and leveraging of deployed infrastructure to meet current and anticipated needs; and (5) enable network engineers to engage in system and technology demonstrations and rigorous experimentation. Over the life of this award (2005-2011), TransLight/StarLight researchers worked with U.S. scientific research and education communities to educate them on the technological innovations and the application advancements enabled by global advanced networking, and to provide both physical trans-Atlantic network circuits and network engineering support. In addition, TransLight/StarLight principal organizers produced documentation, wrote articles, and did demonstrations and presentations at numerous networking conferences, workshops, and scientific conferences. INTELLECTUAL MERIT. TransLight/StarLight provided network infrastructure for 21st-century scientific innovation, enabling scientists to better study and understand complex systems -- whether geological, biological, environmental, atmospheric, or the nature of the physical world itself -- from the micro to the macro scale, in both time and space. This complexity means that no single researcher has the necessary expertise in all the disciplines required to analyze the data and solve problems. Today’s problem solving requires multi-disciplinary teams who, in turn, require new levels of persistent collaboration over continental and transoceanic distances, coupled with the ability to process, disseminate and share information on unprecedented scales. BROADER OUTREACH. In addition to its mission of providing persistent network infrastructure for researchers involved with data-intensive applications, TransLight/StarLight principals are also users of the infrastructure. Its principals are developing new networking tools and techniques to move high-definition video streams and ultra-high-resolution pictures and animations over long distances so they can be shared in real time with colleagues. (Today’s web only streams low-resolution and highly compressed images, typically with jitter and artifacts distorting the imagery, which is not acceptable to scientists who need to examine the details to make discoveries and predictions.) TransLight/StarLight’s pioneering efforts are inspiring industries whose primary business relies on images -- from performance art to motion pictures to medicine -- to use these tools to advance the state of the art. In addition, many of TransLight/StarLight’s collaborators were university faculty, whose students got access to the technology to help with demonstrations and presentations, and gain expertise necessary to become productive members of the next-generation global workforce. And, TransLight/StarLight’s principal members often partnered with network equipment manufacturers and telecommunication providers to create and showcase a marketplace for advanced networking services and products.
