Darkstrand lights up supercomputing apps

Chicago-based Darkstrand emerged from relative obscurity this month, buying half the capacity of the National Lambda Rail, a high-bandwidth 12,000-mile ring around the country created by a consortium of researchers and educators, or R&Es.

Though armed now with some pretty big pipes (40 wavelengths), Darkstrand isn't just another network wholesaler. Among the company's key offerings are the high-performance computing capabilities that the NLR was built to exhibit.

“A lot of these institutions and facilities are meant for heavy R&D, R&E applications,” said Michael Stein, CEO of Darkstrand. “When corporate America tries to go in and use them in a commercial capacity, they're not told no, but there's no clear path. Typically the corporations get frustrated and walk away.”

Stein experienced this frustration firsthand while working for Digital Kitchen, which won an Emmy designing the main title sequence for the HBO series Six Feet Under. Looking for connectivity among Chicago, Los Angeles and Seattle, he tried to convince the Argonne National Laboratory to let him catch a ride on its high-capacity, cross-country link. Though Argonne's charter included working with the private sector, researchers weren't overly helpful because profit wasn't their top priority.

“[Darkstrand] was really born out of frustration,” Stein said.

The company will probably not sell network capacity to traditional telecom service providers, despite having been approached by some, he said. Instead, Darkstrand is likely to work with telcos for last-mile access to enterprise locations in the 30 markets through which its network passes.

“Our real focus is going directly to major corporations in the manufacturing space, the media space, biotechnology and finance,” Stein said. “We want to go strictly to the heavy data movers — the people who'd utilize a 10 Gb/s backbone and a supercomputing application.”