OIL & GAS

DENVER -- Qwest Communications International Inc. announced that Argonne National Laboratory, one of the U.S. Department of Energy's largest research centers, has deployed Qwest's broadband fiber optic network for the Illinois Wired/Wireless Infrastructure for Research and Education (I-WIRE) project. The I-WIRE project provides ultra-high-speed interconnection to major research institutions and universities in Illinois. Under the contract, Qwest provides backbone capacity, site construction, engineering services and dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) equipment, which is designed to maximize the capacity of each fiber strand. The I-WIRE project, run out of Argonne, located 25 miles southwest of Chicago, connects eight campuses -- Argonne National Laboratory, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign/NCSA, University of Illinois-Chicago, Northwestern University Chicago Campus, Illinois Institute of Technology, the University of Chicago and STARLIGHT in Chicago. "I-WIRE is just one more example of Qwest's commitment to the supercomputing efforts of our government and educational research institutions," said James F.X. Payne, senior vice president of Qwest's government services division. "I-WIRE set the pace for others to follow in taking control of their network destiny by owning their own metro fiber and managing their own equipment." The advanced optical network will accelerate research in collaborative and virtual environments. Through this network, people can work, study and create together as if they are in the same physical location. It will enable evaluation of advanced optical network architectures and technologies, providing a testing facility for next-generation ideas and applications. One example of I-WIRE's application is its use in the TeraGrid, a National Science Foundation project to build the world's largest distributed terescale infrastructure for open science research. I-WIRE is providing critical connectivity between computational resources at Argonne and the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign with a capacity that is three times that of the current national backbone. "Qwest's long, successful history of providing services for numerous research facilities throughout the country was a major impetus in our vendor selection process," said Linda Winkler of Argonne National Lab. "The solutions provided by Qwest enabled I-WIRE to build a flexible, high- performance information infrastructure to meet the demanding requirements of the research and education community for network capacity." Other Qwest GSD federal scientific and R&D networks include: * ESnet, a high bandwidth network that links the nation's top scientists, researchers and educators with the Department of Energy's unparalleled research facilities. * Abilene, an Internet2 backbone that connects more than 202 universities and research institutions worldwide. * NREN (NASA's Research and Engineering Network), a network that provides direct broadband local access and comprehensive network operations support. * TeraGrid (Distributed Terascale Facility project), an ultra-high-speed network that builds on the other research projects, including the Global Grid Forum, which envisions a platform for worldwide shared computing resources.