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Argonne National Laboratory Deploys CIENA's ONLINE Metro for Supercomputing Applications

Posted on: Thursday, 26 June 2003, 06:00 CDT

LINTHICUM, Md.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--June 26, 2003--

CIENA Enters Research and Education Market Through Support of TeraGrid and I-WIRE Research Networks

CIENA(R) Corporation (Nasdaq:CIEN), a leading provider of global network solutions, today announced that Argonne National Laboratory, one of the U.S. Department of Energy's largest research centers, has deployed CIENA's ONLINE Metro(TM) DWDM Platform in two separate networks, including the TeraGrid project, the fastest dedicated optical backplane network for distributed computing resources.

CIENA's ONLINE Metro provides Argonne with connectivity solutions, in the form of OC-48 and OC-192 channels, between the Laboratory located 25 miles southwest of Chicago, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) in Champaign, Ill., and several Illinois research and education institutions. The system is also providing OC-48/OC-192 links between locations in the TeraGrid and Illinois Wired/Wireless Infrastructure for Research and Education (I-WIRE) networks, including StarLight, a global experimental optical network exchange facility.

"CIENA was able to offer us a single-vendor, cost-effective solution to fulfill network capacity requirements in our supercomputing research efforts," said Argonne's Charlie Catlett, principal investigator for the I-WIRE project and executive director for the TeraGrid project. "The flexibility of CIENA's ONLINE Metro platform provides Argonne the ability to support multiple interfaces in a banded (grouping of three wavelengths) architecture with proven management and planning tools."

"The flexibility, reliability and cost-efficiency of CIENA's solutions make us an ideal fit for effectively meeting the unique needs of the research and education community," said Jesus Leon, chief development officer at CIENA. "CIENA is excited to be an integral part of Argonne's participation in the development of high-performance information infrastructures like TeraGrid and I-WIRE."

The ONLINE Metro platform is supporting several additional applications for Argonne. It has been deployed as part of the Laboratory's Storage Area Networking (SAN) experiment for transporting Fibre Channel over SONET between the Laboratory and NCSA. It is also being used to support Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) at full bandwidth over a distance of 140 miles without regeneration. And, Argonne has successfully tested ONLINE Metro for 10G LAN PHY capability, which serves as a more cost-effective alternative to traditional SONET services.

ABOUT CIENA

CIENA Corporation delivers innovative network solutions to the world's largest service providers, increasing the cost-efficiency of current services while enabling the creation of new carrier-class data services built upon the existing network infrastructure. Additional information about CIENA can be found at www.ciena.com.

ABOUT ARGONNE NATIONAL LABORATORY

The nation's first national laboratory, Argonne National Laboratory conducts basic and applied scientific research across a wide spectrum of disciplines, ranging from high-energy physics to climatology and biotechnology. Since 1990, Argonne has worked with more than 600 companies and numerous federal agencies and other organizations to help advance America's scientific leadership and prepare the nation for the future. Argonne is operated by the University of Chicago as part of the U.S. Department of Energy's national laboratory system.

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