Wednesday, February 20, 2002

Research Networks Join to Create a Global High-Speed Backbone By FLORENCE OLSEN Officials of advanced networks in North America and Europe have formed an international group to create a global backbone network for use by scientists doing multinational research. A part of the backbone -- between North America and Europe -- has been up and running since January. The new group, which was announced on Monday, includes representatives from Canarie, the Canadian high-speed networking organization; Internet2, the American consortium for advanced networking; and Europe's Dante and National Research and Education Networks Consortium. Dante is a nonprofit advanced-networking organization in Cambridge, England. The NREN Consortium represents 27 European national and regional research and education networks. "We see it as sort of a natural evolution," said Douglas Van Houweling, president and chief executive officer of the Internet2 consortium. The new group also plans to expand to include representatives from Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, and Russia. Members of the group said the high-speed global backbone will provide the connections and advanced Internet services needed for multinational research on high-energy physics, astronomy, weather forecasting, and biological and earth sciences, all of which require the transfer and analysis of huge quantities of data. Such collaboration, they said, has lagged because of the lack of a well-managed and reliable high-speed global backbone. Details of how the group will be organized to handle policy and technical issues haven't been nailed down yet, Mr. Van Houweling said. But to achieve the level of performance, reliability, and security that the researchers need, he added, "you have to manage the network as a whole." The North American and European backbone networks will connect to the global backbone at access points in London, Frankfurt, New York, Chicago, and Seattle. Network engineers at Indiana University's Global Research Network Operations Center and at a similar facility operated by Dante, in Cambridge, will help coordinate and manage the operation of the global backbone. A third network-operations center will be established in the Asia-Pacific region. In the initial phase of the project, the backbone consists of two existing leased circuits across the Atlantic Ocean. Each circuit is capable of moving information at speeds of up to 2.5 gigabits per second. The group intends to provide a global backbone that is at least as fast as the national networks connected to it, said Michael A. McRobbie, vice president for information technology for the Indiana University System. "The national networks have been pretty successful," Mr. McRobbie added. "The problem," which he said the backbone should solve, "has been with international connectivity." Background article from The Chronicle: Managers of Fast Networks See Growing Need for a New International Backbone (2/12/2002) Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

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