rk," says Tracy Futhey, chair of NLR's board of directors and vice president of information technology and chief information officer of Duke University. "While Inter- net2's Abilene network supports research, NLR will offer more options to researchers. Its optical fiber and light waves will be configured to allow essen- tially private research networks between two locations. The traffic and protocols transmitted over NLR's point-to-point infrastruc- ture provide a high degree of security and privacy. "In other words, the one NLR network, with its 'dark fiber' and other technical features gives us 40 essentially private networks, making it the ideal place for the sorts of early experimentation that network researchers need to develop new applications and systems for sharing information," says Futhey. NLR is deploying a switched Ethernet network and a routed IP network over an optical DWDM network. Combined, these networks enable the allocation of independent, dedicated, deterministic, ultra-high-performance network services to applications, groups, networked scientific apparatus and instruments, and research projects. The optical waves enable building networking research testbeds at switching and routing layers with ability to redirect real user traffic over them for testing purposes. For optical layer research testbeds, additional dark fiber pairs are available on the national footprint. NLR's optical and IP infrastructure, combined with robust technical support services, will allow multiple, concurrent large-scale networking research and application experiments to coexist. This capability will enable network researchers to deploy and control their own dedicated testbeds with full visibility and access to underlying switching and transmission fabric. NLR's members and associates include Duke, the Corporation for Educa- tion Network Initiatives in California, the Pacific Northwest Gigapop, the Mid-Atlantic Terascale Partnership and the Virginia Tech Foundation, the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, Cisco Systems, 