Americas Lightpaths Express and Protect Activates First US – Latin America 100G Networking Link Enhancing Infrastructure for Research and Education

Miami, Florida, April 26, 2016 – Florida International University’s Center for Internet Augmented Research and Assessment (CIARA) is pleased to announce the first 100G research and education network link between the U.S. and Latin America, a major component of the five-year AmLight ExP (IRNC BACKBONE: Americas Lightpaths Express and Protect) NSF Award#ACI-1451018.

On April 18, 2016 the AmLight Consortium activated the first 100G link of the AmLight-ExP project. It has 106ms delay and it goes via the Atlantic between Miami, FL and Sao Paulo, Brazil. The 100G link is under evaluation for the next 30 days. “To date, we have not seen any packet loss or errors and, to evaluate it, we are using an IXIA 100G packet generator,” said Jeronimo Bezerra AmLight Chief Network Engineer.

The AmLight Consortium is a group of not-for-profit universities, state, national and regional research and education networks including the AmLight ExP project at Florida International University, RNP, ANSP, RedClara, REUNA, FLR, AURA, Latin American Nautilus, and Internet2.

Robert Grillo, Vice President and CIO at Florida International University said, “This milestone for FIU sets new standards for high speed networking and bandwidth in the Americas that will promote new and innovative activities for all education and research institutions. Our vision will continue to advance scientific research and scholarship across the globe in collaboration with all our partners.”

Elias Eldayrie, Vice President and CIO at the University of Florida and Chairman of the Florida LambdaRail Board of Directors said, “FLR and its 12 Partner Institutions are collaboratively working with FIU to determine the resource requirements, timelines and milestones needed to contribute and collectively achieve FIU’s objectives in the NSF IRNC AmLight-ExP, AtlanticWave-SDX through the use of optical spectrum. Utilizing our 100 Gbps network, we look forward to participating in this experiment to connect multiple U.S. locations through Florida to Brazil and Chile, moving forward together.”

Jeffrey Kantor, of the LSST Project Management Office said, “LSST has partnered with FIU AmLight for our high-speed network needs between Chile and multiple locations in the U.S, including a 100 Gbps ring connecting Santiago and Miami.  This capability will be critical in connecting LSST’s operational sites and permit us to perform near-real-time transient alert processing at our main archive site at the University of Illinois National Center for Supercomputing Applications in Urbana-Champaign, Illinois.”

David Lambert, President and CEO of Internet2 said, “This 100G implementation is extremely valuable to our members, providing them resilient, scalable, long term bandwidth that connects research and education institutions globally. In this global ecosystem, it pays off in spades when researchers and scientists can lean on sophisticated infrastructure to simplify their work and connect in meaningful ways to propel innovation and discovery. Congratulations to FIU, AMPATH and the NSF for this wonderful accomplishment”

“RNP began to collaborate with AMPATH in 2001, and has been a partner since 2004 in the series of IRNC links, co-supported by NSF and ANSP, which provide Research and Education connectivity between the US and Brazil – the AmLight Consortium. These links have constituted Brazil’s principal support for international collaboration, and have steadily grown in capacity over the years. The adoption of 100G links this year represents an increase in capacity of almost 500%, demonstrating ample support for the growth of important data-intensive international science collaborations”, said Dr. Michael Stanton, Director of Research and Development at Brazil’s National Research and Education Network, RNP.

“The Academic Network of Sao Paulo (ANSP) provides connectivity to more than fifty institutions, which are responsible for more than forty percent of Brazilian science production. The AmLight Consortium implementation of 100G protected capacity on the international links is a milestone in our partnership with RNP and FIU for over a decade,” said Dr. Luis Lopez, Principal Investigator (PI) of ANSP.

The AmLight Consortium works together to provide submarine cable connectivity between Miami, FL and Fortaleza and Sao Paulo, Brazil as well as Santiago, Chile for research & education purposes. The AmLight Consortium needs connectivity in the furtherance of its research and educational goals, to promote the development of advanced network applications, content, and services between the US and Latin America. The networking team is currently working on the activation of a second 100G link, going via the Pacific route. After that, the team will establish a 100G link with Fortaleza, Brazil.

Link evaluation is being performed using OpenFlow, a recent innovation of the previous methodologies such as virtual local area networks (VLANs), route loops and TTL (Time to Live) change. The OpenFlow protocol enables network controllers to determine the path of network packets across a network of switches.

The AmLight Consortium is actively seeking new scientific and educational applications for the new 100G network. Researchers involved with Big Data, Networking and/or Software Defined Networking (SDN) can request a virtual network on the new 100G ring from AmLight SDN by sending email to sdn@amlight.net describing your research, how AmLight could help your research, information about your controller, etc., and we will reach you to discuss next steps.

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