NLR is an initiative of U.S. research universities and technology companies to provide a national network infrastructure for research and experimentation in networking technologies.

The network has the ability to support many distinct U.S. research networks using the same core infrastructure. The 3,200-mile wavelength, known as the CAVEwave, will initially tie to the OptIPuter project shared between UIC and the University of California, San Diego. The OptIPuter is a National Science Foundation project that will enable scientists to interactively visualize, analyze and correlate their data from multiple storage sites connected via optical networks.

The OptIPuter will be among several demonstrations supported by the NLR infrastructure at next week's SC2004 conference held in Pittsburgh. Cavewave is used to understand requirements for real-time visualization, analysis and correlation of petabytes of data from multiple storage sites, according to EVL director Tom DeFanti.

"As the first national optical networking infrastructure owned and controlled by the U.S. research community, NLR enables unprecedented control and flexibility in meeting the needs of cutting-edge research projects," said Tom West, CEO of NLR.

Cavewave extends from the UIC laboratory to the StarLight optical Internet exchange in Chicago to the Pacific Northwest GigaPoP in Seattle to the UC-SanDiego campus. In initial tests between Chicago and San Diego to prepare for SC2004 demonstrations, researchers successfully retrieved data sets from a storage cluster at the UC-San Diego Supercomputing Center and displayed them on a 30-megapixel display in Chicago. They included seismic data and data from ultrahigh-resolution microscopy.