26 June 2003 Linthicum, MD Lightwave -- CIENA Corp. today announced that Argonne National Laboratory, one of the U.S. Department of Energy's largest research centers, has deployed CIENA's ONLINE Metro DWDM Platform in two separate networks, including the TeraGrid project, the fastest dedicated optical backplane network for distributed computing resources.
CIENA's ONLINE Metro provides Argonne with connectivity solutions--in the form of OC-48 and OC-192 channels--between the Laboratory, located 25 miles southwest of Chicago, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) in Champaign, IL, and several Illinois research and education institutions. The system is also providing OC-48/OC-192 links between locations in the TeraGrid and Illinois Wired/Wireless Infrastructure for Research and Education (I-WIRE) networks, including StarLight, a global experimental optical network exchange facility.
"CIENA was able to offer us a single-vendor, cost-effective solution to fulfill network capacity requirements in our supercomputing research efforts," explains Argonne's Charlie Catlett, principal investigator for the I-WIRE project and executive director for the TeraGrid project. "The flexibility of CIENA's ONLINE Metro platform provides Argonne the ability to support multiple interfaces in a banded [grouping of three wavelengths] architecture with proven management and planning tools."
The ONLINE Metro platform is supporting several additional applications for Argonne. It has been deployed as part of the Laboratory's Storage Area Networking (SAN) experiment for transporting Fibre Channel over SONET between the Laboratory and NCSA. It is also being used to support Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) at full bandwidth over a distance of 140 miles without regeneration. And Argonne has successfully tested ONLINE Metro for 10G LAN PHY capability, which serves as a more cost-effective alternative to traditional SONET services.