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Research Networks Branch Out
By Michael Stutz, Wired News

October 5, 1998

The National Science Foundation on Monday announced awards that will enable the creation of high-performance international research networks connecting scientific, research, and educational facilities in the United States, Asia, and Russia.

Indiana University and the University of Tennessee won the awards to establish the high-speed networks. Indiana received approximately $10 million to create TransPAC, the link between several countries on the Pacific Rim - initially, Japan, Korea, Singapore, and Australia - to the very high-performance Backbone Network Service, or vBNS. The high-bandwidth nationwide network of research facilities was launched in 1995 by MCI and the NSF.

Vice President Al Gore said the networks will “accelerate the pace of scientific discovery by linking scientists, research facilities, supercomputers, and databases.”

The networks will enable experimental science and research, including access for US scientists to an electron microscope at the University of Osaka in Japan. The networks will also be used for a myriad of high-bandwidth collaborative applications, including distance learning, cooperative training, and remote data acquisition and processing in fields as diverse as astronomy, molecular biology, high energy physics, medicine, and computational science.

The University of Tennessee will use its $4 million award to establish connections from the vBNS to high-performance networks in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Tennessee founded the collaborative networking project MirNET with Russian partners, including Moscow State University, the Friends & Partners Foundation, and the Russian Institute of Public Networking.

Gaston said both projects will have connection points at STAR TAP - the Science, Technology, And Research Transit Access Point - an NSF-funded infrastructure based in Chicago. STAR TAP is designed to create persistent, international connections to various research networks, including 100-odd research facilities and supercomputing centers in the United States. It currently operates at a speed of 45 megabits per second, and plans are being made to uprade it to 155 megabits per second.

STAR TAP is the entry point for all of the international networks into the US networks,” said its principle investigator Thomas DeFanti.

DeFanti said that the rationale behind bringing all of the circuits to one switch in Chicago, rather than connecting the Pacific Rim networks on the West Coast and the European networks on the East Coast, is so it will be a world-to-world, global network - not a US-centric one.

“The problem with having the Europeans coming on the East Coast, and the Asians coming to the West Coast is called the ‘transit traffic’ problem,” said DeFanti. “Our federal networks are not allowed to carry foreign transit traffic, even for experimental science reasons.”


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