News From USJFCOM: USJFCOM to join high-tech scientific research network

USJFCOM to join high-tech scientific research network

U.S. Joint Forces Command will join five other local partners on the Eastern Virginia LightWave Internetworking Technology Enterprise network, a high-speed, high-bandwidth network in southeastern Virginia that supports scientific and military research.

• Listen to the podcast

By Robert Pursell
USJFCOM Public Affairs

(SUFFOLK, Va. - Nov. 07, 2006) -- U.S. Joint Forces Command (USJFCOM) will join five other local government and education partners on a high-speed, high-bandwidth network designed and engineered specifically for scientific and military research.

The Eastern Virginia LightWave Internetworking Technology Enterprise network (E-LITE) will be connected to the National LambdaRail (NLR) network, which is a unique nationwide network infrastructure that is owned and maintained by the U.S. research community. That community includes U.S. research universities, regional networking organizations and private technology companies.

The NLR is an 11,000-mile nationwide infrastructure that enables the simultaneous deployment of multiple networks for experimental and production purposes. The hope is that E-LITE's linkage to the NLR will allow USJFCOM and its partners to more openly share research data and finds.

E-LITE is in the final stages of service provisioning through a five year contract awarded to Verizon in December 2005 by Old Dominion University, who manages and funds the project. Verizon has installed 150 miles of fiber-optic cabling, as well as networking hardware at each of the E-LITE partner node locations at NASA Langley, College of William & Mary, Virginia Modeling and Simulation Center (VMASC), Jefferson Labs and USJFCOM's Suffolk complex

USJFCOM's Mark Williams, the Joint Technology and Simulation division deputy chief, described the NLR as a research and development national super highway used to transport large amounts of experimentation research from one institution to another at extremely high speeds and at a reasonable cost.

E-LITE offers a comprehensive list of services to users, including;
• a multiple 10 gigabyte per second Internet Protocol (IP) network itself, offering significantly greater speed than the current system.
• a quick start facility for new research projects in support of data and computation intensive science projects,
• a capability to spare projects in case there is a channel specific failure,
• and a test bed facility for Internet2 shared by the universities.

"From the superhighway (NLR), you have these tributaries and branches that distribute connectivity to the local area, and E-LITE is that network that's going to distribute here in southeastern Virginia," he said.

Williams said this also helps establish southeastern Virginia as the primary hub for modeling and simulation.

"With support at the local, state, and federal level, southeastern Virginia is becoming the modeling and simulation capital. The commercial capabilities here and the economic development side of this is pretty huge too because having this high speed network in this local area will draw these companies that make and sell products along these lines," said Williams.

Williams said USJFCOM's goal is to use the NLR to collaborate with academia on system design and engineering to develop new simulation tools and products that would essentially push new capabilities to the joint warfighter faster, cheaper and better.

"We're always looking at developing new technology and techniques to help train them better," he said. "We're developing products in the modeling and simulation world to help stimulate their real world systems in training environment.

"The result of this is a better warfighter, through better training and we're constantly improving them, developing new tools to help them achieve their mission."