Each fiber with today’s technology can
carry up to the equivalent of 2.5 million DSL lines in terms of data transfer.
The fiber is expected to be able to carry 20 times more traffic as technology
improves.
The fiber cable covers 22 route miles
in the
Houston
Metropolitan area and consists of two rings with 12 fibers each giving a total
of approximately 500 fiber miles.
This TLC2 initiative was enabled by a
multi-million dollar education / industry partnership with AboveNet.
Lead by the Texas Learning and Computation Center (TLC2) at the
University
of
Houston, the Research and Education
Network of Houston (RENoH) is a fiber optical network
that has the capability to significantly advance the research and educational achievements
of several
Gulf
Coast
Universities and the
Texas
Medical
Center. RENoH was initiated by the TLC2 Director in support of research
collaborations between the
University
of
Houston (UH),
Rice
University, and Baylor College of
Medicine, but due to the great interest and needs of collaborators at other
institutions in
Houston, in
Texas, nationally and internationally the
scope of RENoH has rapidly grown and will soon include connectivity for The
University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHSCH), MD Anderson
Cancer Center, the State fiberoptic network LEARN (Lonestar Education and Research Network) and NLR (the
National Lambda Rail). Connectivity to NASA’s
Johnson
Space
Center
in
Houston is
under consideration.
With developments in optical transmission equipment it is
expected that the RENoH fiber infrastructure is
sufficient to ensure that RENoH partners will have
the ability to deploy communications capabilities to offer state of the art
education and training and to be research competitive over the next 1-2 decades and to assume significant roles
in local, regional, national and international research collaborations.
RENoH provides its partners state-of-the art
inter-institutional communication capabilities and is a cornerstone for realizing
the Texas Internet Grid for Research and Education,
TIGRE,
funded by the State of
Texas.
TIGRE core partners are
Texas
Tech University,
UT
Austin,
Texas
A&M
University,
University of
Houston
and
Rice
University. RENoH is also enabling
University
of
Houston to assume a
significant role in High-Energy Physics research by providing the apabilities to receive the very large volume of experimental data that
will be produced by the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in
Geneva,
Switzerland
. RENoH and LEARN will facilitate distributed collaborative
research initiatives such as the Air Quality Modeling and Forecasting effort
carried out jointly by researchers at University of Houston, Texas A&M
University and University of Texas in which significant data volumes need to be
transferred daily. Bioinformatics, biomedicine, and biodefense research are other areas that we expect to benefit significantly from the RENoH capabilities.
