by Tim Terman
magine reposing on a wide, almost
deserted beach on a beautiful day, reading a John le Carré
novel. The sun is hot, but there's a cool breeze puffing in from
a glimmering ocean as sandpipers tiptoe along a foaming surf.
Then, several million nearly naked men, women, and children arrive,
smeared with coconut oil, ening to The Beastie Boys on boom
boxes and tossing beach balls, yakking and kicking up sand.
Nobody likes crowds. And that's getting to be the situation on the Internet these days, compared to when the medium got its start some 30 years ago as a Department of Defense project, or when universities began using the Internet to exchange information about 20 years ago through involvement of the National Science Foundation.
With the growing congestion of the current Internet, many researchers have found that the system does not support their work. In the 1980s, the Internet became a primary medium for collaboration in research. But as the system was commercialized and opened for widespread use, millions of people began using it through Internet service providers such as Yahoo!, America Online, and Prodigy. This has created a thriving marketplace in cyberspace, but has diminished its usefulness to researchers who depend on exchanges of large quantities of data.
However, order from chaos has arrived—for WVU scientists and a select few others, at least. The University is now the only institution in West Virginia connected to the National Science Foundation's Next Generation Internet. And WVU is one of only about 100 research universities in the United States that are part of the NGI. This connection makes possible data exchanges that were either not feasible or prohibitively slow through the older Internet connection.
Connected via the
Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, WVU joins Carnegie Mellon University,
the University of Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania State University
as regional members of the NGI. The Pittsburgh Supercomputing
Center is operated by Carnegie Mellon University in consultation
with the University of Pittsburgh and with the assistance of
Westinghouse Electric Company.
"From movies and TV, we get the impression of scientific breakthroughs being made by researchers working alone in a laboratory," says H.L. Layman, the Pittsburgh Supercomputing program manager for Westinghouse. "In fact, while that does happen, the majority of progress is made through teams of people collaborating on their work, and the high performance network brings a new approach to that collaboration, enabling researchers to use tools like supercomputers, scanning electron microscopes, and other remarkable devices, no matter where the researchers are. We are very pleased to be working with WVU in advancing this exciting capability."
WVU's previous Internet connection was achieved via what are called T-1 lines, each allowing for a maximum of about 1.5 megabits per second to be sent or received. T-1 lines are much faster—that is, they have a higher bandwidth, allowing more data to flow through—than normal home telephone lines, which allow data transmission at a maximum of 0.057 megabits per second.
On a typical home computer with a regular phone line and good modem, a research file of about 20 megabytes would take at least an hour to download. On the NGI, the same file can be downloaded in less than four seconds.
At least 30 times faster than a single T-1 connection, WVU's new NGI connection is equal to all the capacity of current Internet connections for higher education and state government in West Virginia. Also, because the NGI is a new Internet network and its use will be restricted to the academic and research community, it is not affected by the traffic jams on the original Internet caused by web surfers, private web sites, and commercial use.
The ability to send and receive large digital files via the NGI will have a profound effect on the ability of researchers around the world to work together, says Richard Kouzes, WVU's director of program development for science and engineering. "This connectivity allows WVU researchers to collaborate in science and engineering projects with colleagues at other research universities around the globe to develop the next generation of computing applications," he says.
"The Next Generation Internet is an enabling infrastructure, like the superhighway system, that provides American researchers with state-of-the-art access to the world's computing resources at speeds that double every year," Kouzes explains. "As one of the small set of institutions that are privileged to be part of the NGI, WVU, its faculty, and students benefit from the highest performance available in network technology today."
One example is in the development of new drugs in the School of Pharmacy, where Patrick Callery is chairman of basic pharmaceutical sciences. "Our drug design research is made up of interdisciplinary research collaborations and involves scientists at distant locations," he says. "NGI will give us a better opportunity for high-quality teleconferencing, which would include the rapid transfer of data. Our data includes complex chemical structures that are sent as very large files. High speed of transmission is important to us."
Another example is in the University's Geographic Information Systems Center, where new high-tech digital maps are created and used. NGI development will enable collaborations with federal agencies and national and international academic institutions, involving the extremely large files required to handle mapping data.
In the English Department's Center for Literary Computing (see related story, page 18), the large files required in virtual environments to illustrate concepts in three dimensions will flow through the NGI. Using its connectivity capabilities, CLC Coordinator Susan Warshauer and her students will be able to explore and share literary texts far beyond the confines of the printed page.
C.S. Lewis said the future is "something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is." Yet, with WVU's increased capabilities on the Internet, that definition seems a little static and confining. Sometimes, try as we might, we never reach the possibilities that lie ahead. But for students and faculty in Morgantown and at the WVU regional campuses, connection to the NGI ensures a clear, wide highway to the future and a front seat in the technology to take us there.
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