Wednesday, March 6, 2002

New Software for Linux Machines Speeds Connections to High-Speed Networks By JEFFREY R. YOUNG What good is a high-speed research network if your computer is not ready for life in the fast lane? A new free software tool gives a popular computer operating system a tuneup so it can make better use of the fast computer networks that many universities have linked to. The basic operating-system software installed on most computers is set up for standard Internet connections. So users who plug in to high-speed networks must reconfigure their systems if they want to use the full capacity of the networks. But most users probably do not have the time or knowledge to make those refinements. So a project called Web100 has created software to make it easier for users to tune their computers for high-speed data transfer -- provided they use machines running the Linux operating system, which is popular among computer scientists. Anyone can download the software at no charge from the project's Web site, as long as he or she agrees to share any changes made to the software. So far, the software is still in a "working prototype" phase, says Matt Mathis, a network engineer at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center who helped build the software. The software's developers are working to improve it and make it more user-friendly so that any researcher could easily use it. "It currently requires a lot of experience in software code" to make full use of the software, says Mr. Mathis. The benefits can be substantial. In some cases, the software could make a computer's network link 300 times faster than it would be otherwise, says Mr. Mathis. One project that is already experimenting with the Web100 software is the Visible Human Project. "We've seen performance increases of up to 10 times on this thing," says Brian D. Athey, an assistant professor of biomedical informatics at the University of Michigan, which leads the Visible Human Project. "It can make the difference between something that's choppy and something that's not choppy," he adds, noting that some of his project's online tools can be slow to refresh when computers do not use the Web100 software. Mr. Athey's biggest complaint about the software is that it is not available for Windows-based or Macintosh computers, which many researchers use. Mr. Mathis says the software engineers started with Linux because that operating system's source code is freely available and therefore easier to build high-end software for. He says that the group hopes its efforts will encourage companies like Microsoft to build similar tools into their operating systems. The Web100 project, which started last year, is run by the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. It is supported by a grant of nearly $3-million from the National Science Foundation. Background articles from The Chronicle: Group Releases Free Software for Creating a Virtual Supercomputer (7/2/2001) Grants Let Medical Scholars Explore Uses of Next Generation Internet (10/30/1998) Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

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