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The State of Illinois I-WIRE Project |
Illinois Wired/Wireless Infrastructure for Research and Education (I-WIRE)
I-WIRE is a dark fiber communications infrastructure interconnecting Argonne National Laboratory, the University of Illinois (Chicago and Urbana campuses, including the National Center for Supercomputing Applications- NCSA and the Electronic Visualization Laboratory- EVL), the University of Chicago, Illinois Institute of Technology, Northwestern University, the Illinois Century Network Chicago hub, and a several collocation facilities in Chicago.
Using a dedicated dark fiber plant and Ciena DWDM transport equipment, I-WIRE currently provides point-to-point lambda services between I-WIRE sites. Each I-WIRE site has a minimum of one OC-48 (2.5 Gb/s) lambda providing connectivity to Starlight. Projects using I-WIRE as of 2003 include the NSF-funded TeraGrid, OptiPuter, DOT and Teraport projects. The TeraGrid project, for example, uses I-WIRE to provide 30 Gb/s (3 x OC-192) connections between Starlight, Argonne and NCSA.
Since early 2002 the I-WIRE fiber plant has been in place as shown in the figure below. I-WIRE fiber has been obtained via 20 year IRU agreements with multiple carriers. Additional funding, appropriated in 2003, will be used to extend I-WIRE fiber to additional locations (targeting Peoria and Decatur) and to augment the Chicago metro plant to add redundancy and potentially coverage of additional commercial collocation points.
Installation of the linear segments was completed early June 2002. Installation of the metro ring was completed in Aug 2003.
EVL, ANL and Northwestern leveraged I-WIRE fiber to create Starlight, a follow-on to StarTAP, hosted at Northwestern University's Chicago campus (Abbott Hall, 710 N. Lake Shore Drive). Most of the major backbone networks in North America peer at Starlight including Abilene, ESnet, CANARIE's CA*Net project as well as other international networks such as SURFnet and its Gigaport project in the Netherlands.
Contacts: Charlie Catlett (catlett@mcs.anl.gov), Linda Winkler (winkler@mcs.anl.gov) .
Last updated Dec 2004