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June 4, 2004

National LambdaRail Membership Grows

National LambdaRail, Inc. (NLR), a consortium of leading U.S. research universities and private sector technology companies, announced six new members have joined NLR in its mission to deploy a new and unique national networking infrastructure to foster the concurrent advancement of networking research and next generation network-based applications in science, engineering, and medicine. NLR aims to energize innovative research and development into next generation network technologies, protocols, services, and applications.

The new members will enable NLR to expand its nationwide infrastructure to over 10,000 miles, reaching new points of presence in New York City, Baton Rouge, Houston, Tulsa, Albuquerque, and Phoenix. NLR is an $80 to $100 million initiative with each member contributing at least $5 million over the next five years.

New members joining NLR are Cornell University, representing New York and New England; the Louisiana Board of Regents; the Oklahoma State Board of Regents; the Texas Lonestar Education and Research Network (LEARN); the University of New Mexico; and the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) representing Colorado, Wyoming, and Utah.

“It is very exciting for Texas universities to participate in this critical national initiative,” said Dan Updegrove, Chairman of LEARN and Vice President for Information Technology at The University of Texas at Austin. “Moreover, the opportunity to join NLR has been a significant catalyst for both creating the LEARN organization and developing a state optical network for research and education.”

“We are extremely pleased to welcome these six new members to National LambdaRail,” said Tracy Futhey, NLR Board Chair. “Through NLR, members will benefit their own researchers and faculty, as well as the national research and education communities, by helping to ensure the widespread availability and use of the unique NLR infrastructure. The addition of our new members ensures the completion of the national NLR infrastructure by spring 2005.”

NLR’s national networking infrastructure provides scientists and networking researchers with unprecedented control over a wide range of facilities, capabilities, and services that support application-level and networking-level experiments. In addition to supporting cutting-edge uses of optical networking capabilities in research and education, a primary goal of NLR is to bring together networking research communities to solve complex challenges of network architecture, end-to-end performance, and scaling. The NLR infrastructure will initially provide four separate 10 gigabit per second wavelengths with provisions to add another 28 to 36 wavelengths as needed to support members’ research collaborations.

The new NLR members join the Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California (CENIC); the Pacific Northwest GigaPop (PNWGP); the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center; Duke University, representing a coalition of North Carolina Universities; the Mid-Atlantic Terascale Partnership (MATP) and the Virginia Tech Foundation; Cisco Systems; Internet2; Florida LambdaRail; the Georgia Institute of Technology; and the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC).

About National LambdaRail
National LambdaRail, Inc. (NLR) is a major initiative of U.S. research universities and private sector technology companies to provide a national scale infrastructure for research and experimentation in networking technologies and applications. NLR puts the control, the power and the promise of experimental network infrastructure in the hands of our nation’s scientists and researchers.

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