StarPlane is a NWO funded project with major contributions from SURFnet and NORTEL. The vision is to allow part of the photonic network infrastructure of the Dutch National Research and Education Network SURFnet6 to be manipulated by Grid applications to optimize the performance of specific e-Science applications.

StarPlane will use the physical infrastructure provided by SURFnet6 and the distributed supercomputer DAS-3. Hybrid optical networks such as SURFnet6 allow network users to partition the network resources and to create multiple overlay networks, each with a different logical topology. The novelty of this project is that it does give this flexibility directly to the applications by allowing them to choose the logical topology in real time, ultimately with subsecond switching times.