Rice Has New Role in New Internet2

Rice Has New Role in New Internet2
BY LIA UNRAU
Rice News Staff
Nov. 5, 1998

A faster, more powerful information super highway is under construction bearing
a seemingly simple name: Internet2.

Researchers from about 130 universities, including Rice, have invested considerable
time and money to link campuses to this new, high-bandwidth Internet system.

Given the speed information will travel across Internet2, innovations from
university and government research labs in technology that make use of that
speed are expected to increase dramatically.

Internet2 has been testing its capabilities by creating Abilene, a high-speed,
high-performance $500 million network. It is a cousin to the National Science
Foundation’s "very high-performance Backbone Network Service," better
known as the vBNS, another advanced research and education network.

The Abilene project plans to interconnect with the vBNS and work with federal
agencies involved in the Next Generation Internet initiative. Abilene and the
vBNS will both serve as Internet2 backbone networks.

Nearly 500 university researchers and corporate members of Internet2 met recently
for the first public demonstration of Abilene. The Abilene network is now supporting
applications between Purdue University, Indiana University, the Great Plains
Network in Kansas City, the University of Washington and San Francisco.

The network will formally launch in January 1999. The group plans to build
a network that pushes beyond commercially available technology and bring about
70 universities on board. It will provide unparalleled networking capabilities
and advanced services, such as quality of service and multicast.

Rice is interested in Abilene and is considering it for possible use after
an existing contract for vBNS service expires, said Farrell Gerbode, director
of networking and telecommunications.

Abilene was developed by the University Corporation for Advanced Internet Development
(UCAID), of which Rice is a member, in partnership with Qwest Communications,
Nortel (Northern Telecom) and Cisco Systems.

"This provides us with a test bed for experimentation on the infrastructure
for high-speed connections," Gerbode said.

"I think we will see conferencing applications in a broad sense–audio
or video–which would prove helpful to the business of running the university."
Gerbode said. Faculty and administrators could use private links with people
across campus, across the country, and, in some cases, internationally.

New research applications are needed to take advantage of the network’s potential.

"We will see how applications can exploit the bandwidth now that it is
available," Gerbode said.

Also through Rice’s membership in Internet2, Rice became a host of a "Texas
GigaPOP" with Texas A&M University. GigaPOPs are regional network-shared
resource points being formed by Internet2 universities to connect to a variety
of high-performance and other types of networks. GigaPOPs provide scalable high-speed
connection points.

The University of Houston and an institution in Stockholm recently created
a high-speed private network using the Texas GigaPOP to collaborate on a project.
Such collaborations would not be subject to strict time constraints, as they
currently are on the vBNS network, for instance.

Examples of applications that could take advantage of the Internet2 bandwidth
include "learningware," digital libraries, tele-immersion and virtual
laboratories. One example of an audio and video application is making expert
surgeons available as collaborators during surgeries in remote or underdeveloped
areas and at smaller hospitals.

Another test bed for the Internet2 is Research TV, a collaborative video-sharing
program among research universities and corporate research centers aimed at
bringing educational research programming to the public.

Hubert Daugherty, information technology specialist, is one of Rice’s representatives
working with Research TV.

"For Rice, Internet2 is a wonderful addition to our suite of tools that
we can use to connect faster and better to other universities," Daugherty
said.

The University of Washington, which heads up Research TV, demonstrated how
digitized high-speed video and audio, at a quality comparable to DirectTV, could
be sent across the Internet2 system to transfer files from one university to
another.

Selected lower bandwidth video materials and 24-hour-a-day Web casts are also
available to the public on the traditional Internet. The research programming
is also shown on campus cable systems, and Research TV hopes to broadcast the
programming via satellite in the future.

For related information visit the following Web site:
University Corporation for Advanced Internet Development