LINCOLN, Neb. and PARIS -- The University of Nebraska (UNL) has installed DWDM equipment from Ekinops, a leading provider of optical transport and DWDM solutions, that massively increases connectivity to its campus in Lincoln and is critical to the university's participation in an international physics research project, Ekinops announced today.

The new optical network took part in a demonstration on Tuesday at the opening session of the Internet2 Member Meeting in San Diego. The demonstration showed how a sustained 8 Gigabits per second stream from the UNL physics lab, transported by the Ekinops equipment to the Internet2 network node in Kansas City, was then dynamically switched across the Internet2 backbone.

To enhance its participation in the CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) CMS project, the university has deployed the Ekinops 360 platform, using multiple DWDM channels, each running at 10 Gigabits per second. It increased the university's available bandwidth more than 48 times compared with its previous connectivity speed.

The Ekinops 360 is a carrier-class optical transport platform designed for metro, regional, and long-haul networks. The platform can aggregate and transport any Ethernet, Fibre Channel, SONET, or SDH client protocol.

The University of Nebraska-Lincoln, a 22,000-student campus that is part of the University of Nebraska system, is a Tier 2 site in the CMS project, one of the ongoing experiments at the CERN particle accelerator in Switzerland. The CMS project generates massive amounts of data, which is distributed to different computing centers across the world for processing.

To fully participate in the project, the university needed a network capable of carrying massive amounts of data to its supercomputers. Approximately 200 Terabytes (200 trillion bytes) of data are transported weekly.

Dale Finkelson, the university's network engineer, was tasked with finding a solution with greater transport capacity to the university. "We evaluated different options but building our own optical network and utilizing DWDM promised the greatest increase to our capacity and was extremely affordable at the same time," Finkelson explained.

Ekinops SA