Advanced Networking Research Resources

iCAIR utilizes a wide range of resources in support of its research and development projects. iCAIR has established several research laboratories, at multiple sites and uses large scale network facilities, including those that support major experimental network testbeds. These facilities support many large scale testbeds and prototype infrastructure, within metro areas, as well as those that are state-wide, regional, national and international in scale.

Procedures and processes developed by iCAIR allow networking resources, including at the component level, to be used within customized experimental infrastructure, as separate environments. Among these networking resources are those that can be partitioned and dynamically discovered, assembled, configured and reconfigured. These capabilities enable the facilities to support multiple experimental networks simultaneously.

Advanced Networking Facilities at StarLight

On Northwestern's Chicago campus, iCAIR has developed an optical networking facility, which is used, along with related facilities, as part of a distributed laboratory. This facility is within one of Northwestern's major data communications centers. This data communications center location is the home of StarLight - the "Optical STAR TAP" --- an advanced international optical networking facility, which is being developed in partnership with the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at the University of Illinois, the Math and Computer Science Division of Argonne National Laboratory, CANARIE, SURFnet and others in the international advanced networking community. This facility also hosts the primary node of OMNInet, a metro area advanced optical networking testbed. The facility is also a federal agency network exchange, and is a core hub of the national TeraGrid, the state-wide I-WIRE optical network, and of the Metropolitan Research and Education Network (MREN).

Last Updated: 11 May 2009