MARCH 2005 MAXIMUMPC 41
SON OF
INTERNET
looks a bit like a giant belt buckle). Each link is made up of a pair
of humongous fiber-optic cables that use Dense Wave Division
Multiplexing (DWDM) to support a total of 40 simultaneous chan-
nels using different wavelengths. DWDM sounds intense, but the
concept is pretty simple to understand. Just like a prism breaks
up “white” sunlight into a spectrum of colors, wave-division mul-
tiplexing breaks up light traveling through a fiber-optic cable into
separate wavelengths. Each wavelength can act as a separate net-
work channel, hosing data through the pipe at a sweaty-palmed
10Gb/s. That’s about 250 times faster than most Internet service
providers can currently manage, and it’s 6,000 times faster than
that ADSL link you’re so proud of.
With 40 channels to play with, National LambdaRail is able
to host several different networking experiments simultaneously.
Some researchers are looking at technologies to increase the
Internet protocol address space (see the sidebar on IPv6 on page
42); others are looking at ways to improve the reliability of the
Internet packet delivery (called Quality of Service, or QOS) so it can
be used for time-sensitive applications such as streaming video.
One of the projects even treats the entire LambdaRail as a local-area
network. It actually uses Ethernet protocols over a network that’s3,000 miles from end to end. Imagine a network where you could
run Word in New York, but save your documents on a file server in
L.A. Or switch on a diskless workstation in Houston and boot it with
an OS loaded directly from Microsoft in Seattle.
At the moment, LambdaRail is kept separate from the
Internet. That’s because global commerce is now so dependent
on the Internet that scientists dare not muck about with it in
case they cause a major outage and find a caravan of lawyers
camping out on the front lawn. LambdaRail gives them a safe
test-bed where they can try out new technologies, but one that’s
also big enough to enable realistic experiments. The idea is that
as the individual proof-of-concept networks running over the
LambdaRail become more stable, they can quickly be deployed as
usable tools. All the nodes on LamdaRail are U.S. universities and
corporations, and there are plenty of high-performance research
projects out there that can benefit from the ability to shift around
gigantic amounts of data quickly. Remember that all the networks
on LambdaRail cover the same geographical territory (at least
potentially—some of them have servers at only a few of the avail-
able LambdaRail nodes). What distinguishes these networks is
the protocol used to move the data.Check out the cable end
that will enable you to tap
into a mind-bendingly fast
new Internet, shown at
actual size (just kidding)