Cornell University is the focal point of a new organization that will enable educational institutions in New York state and New England to connect to and support a high-bandwidth computer network.

With the formation of Northeast LambdaRail (NeLR), participating institutions will be able to connect to National LambdaRail (NLR), a fiber-optic network owned and operated by the scientists and scholars who use it. The new network initially will allow member institutions to connect to one another and to the national network at speeds of 10 Gps (gigabits per second), ultimately scalable to terabit speeds. Such speeds will allow, for example, remote operation of Cornell's supercomputers or the exchange of massive amounts of data resulting from particle accelerator experiments or sky surveys by the Arecibo Observatory radio telescope in Puerto Rico.

NLR is a consortium of leading U.S. research universities and private-sector technology companies deploying a nationwide networking infrastructure to support research in science, engineering, health care and education. It is also designed to provide a research platform for new Internet technologies. Cornell joined the consortium in June 2004, pledging $1 million a year over five years to help support the development of the network. Cornell's support was contingent on NLR services being made available to other institutions in the region, with those institutions taking over part of the cost.

Members of NeLR each will contribute $50,000 to Cornell for fiscal 2005-06, with future fees to be determined, and each will be represented on an advisory board. Cornell, in turn, will represent NeLR on NLR's board.

Charter members of NeLR are New York University, Columbia University, Rochester Institute of Technology, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, University of Rochester, State University of New York campuses at Albany and Buffalo, and Tufts University. NYSERNet, the New York educational network, provides technical implementation of the network and also holds a seat on the NeLR board.

NLR is not only about speed but also about control. Rather than simply buying bandwidth on commercial networks, it owns its "dark fiber" - the physical network of optical fiber that carries digital signals - and owns and operates the hardware that "lights" the optical fiber with signals. Owning the fiber not only provides increased bandwidth at lower cost, but also allows researchers to set up dedicated connections for research, including research aimed at improving network hardware and software. The network also will enable "grid computing" in which a problem is parallel-processed on high-performance computers in several locations.

The name "LambdaRail" derives from the fact that scientists generally use the Greek letter lambda to represent the wavelength of light.