Wednesday, April 17, 2002

New York's Natural History Museum Pioneers Use of Internet2 By FLORENCE OLSEN More than 190 universities are connected to Abilene, the backbone network operated by the Internet2 consortium of research universities. But only one independent museum -- the American Museum of Natural History in New York -- participates in the network consortium. Other museums have inquired about Internet2 but so far have not participated, says Greg Wood, a spokesman for Internet2. In many ways, New York's natural-history museum is like a research university, with similar needs for a high-speed research network. "Most people think of museums as halls with dusty display cases," says Francis C. Lees, chief information officer for the museum. But "the real engine" behind a big museum, he says, is research -- the museum has a research faculty and research fellows, just like any large university. Sebastien Lepine, a post-doctoral fellow at the museum, had figured that it would take him a year, using the commercial Internet, to finish downloading two 360-degree digital sky surveys for his study of fast-moving stars. But that was before the museum connected to Abilene. The museum's new high-speed connection to Abilene is more than 100 times as fast as the institution's former connections to the Internet. The museum had two T1 lines, one of which was used 100 percent 24 hours a day, seven days a week ferrying Mr. Lepine's data from the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore to the museum in New York. With his hands no longer tied by a slow network, Mr. Lepine can begin work on "the real science," says Mordecai-Mark Mac Low, assistant curator of astrophysics at the New York museum. Mr. Mac Low says the Internet2 connection has freed Mr. Lepine and many of the museum's 200 other researchers to spend less time collecting data "in tiny snippets" and more time analyzing the information. Mr. Mac Low, who is a computational astrophysicist, says his own research requires much more bandwidth than the commercial Internet provided. He uses three-dimensional gas dynamical simulations for his study of how stars form. The calculations are done at supercomputer centers in Illinois and California, and the results are now shipped over the Internet2 backbone to the museum, where he analyzes the data. The natural-history museum also supports research on a very different scale for the study of animal genomes. That research depends on having large databases of genome sequences, which are updated daily and downloaded almost as frequently. "If you want to make that practicable, you have to have very high bandwidth connections," says Ward Wheeler, a curator of invertebrate zoology who studies the evolutionary history of arthropods -- insects, centipedes, millipedes, crustaceans, and spiders. Mr. Wheeler combines genomic-sequence data with morphological and other data sets, and develops his own computational tools, or algorithms, to analyze the data. Mr. Wheeler says he collaborates with scientists all over the world, not all of whom have high-speed Internet connections. If he sends data to a scientist at another institution that is connected to the Internet2 backbone, Mr. Wheeler says his data gets automatically routed from his desktop computer to the Abilene backbone. A researcher with an Internet2 connection doesn't have to do anything differently, he says. "Just all of a sudden, things go a lot faster at your desktop." As great as the museum's bandwidth needs are for research, the network capacity needed for producing the museum's educational displays is often greater, says Mr. Lees, the museum's CIO. The museum used the Internet2 backbone to move very large graphical files while it was developing the high-resolution astronomical images that are projected onto the dome of the museum's Hayden Planetarium. "The space show lived on Internet2 during production," Mr. Mac Low says. One long sequence of the show consists of three-dimensional renderings of complex computational models for how stars and planets are formed. The images -- about a half-trillion bytes of data -- were produced at the San Diego Supercomputer Center at the University of California at San Diego and at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and sent back to the museum over the Internet2 backbone. But the museum's biggest growing need for a fast Internet is high-definition television, according to Mr. Lees. The museum now regularly produces high-definition-television segments for educational and research purposes, and it shares them with other museums. The HDTV segments show ecological, oceanographic, and animal studies that the museum has under way throughout the world. "These are all things being captured in the new video format that is so much more appealing because of its high density," Mr. Lees says. The National Museum of Natural History in Washington is not connected to Abilene, but it may soon need such network capacity, says Anna Weitzman, research and collections informatics manager for the museum. Ms. Weitzman says she is concerned about having enough Internet bandwidth to share the museum's vast specimen database with other researchers and with policy makers when those 5 million records are put online sometime next year. "We absolutely have a need," she says. Having more Internet capacity at New York's natural-history museum has opened up avenues for research and education that were prohibitive before, says Mr. Lees, the CIO. A good example is Mr. Lepine's comparative study of near-Earth moving objects, for which he is using two digitized sky surveys that were done 40 years apart -- in 1950 and 1990. Because of the network resources now available to researchers studying such objects, Mr. Lees says, "the discovery of those has moved apace at an unbelievable rate." Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

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