IBM, Northwestern University, Ameritech, and Cisco are establishing a new research center to test advanced Internet applications on the Northwestern campus in Evanston, Illinois.
The Advanced Internet Technology Research Center will open in late 1998 and test heavy-duty applications -- for industrial sectors, corporate processes, education, and personal communications -- that take advantage of the high-performance networking built into the Internet2 backbone.
"This Center will be the incubator for advanced Internet applications. By accelerating the pace of Internet research and collaboration, the killer applications of the future will go beyond what we can imagine today," said John Patrick, vice president of Internet technology at IBM, in a statement.
The Center and its researchers will have test-bed access to the recently announced second backbone of the Internet2 project, dubbed Abilene. This next tier of the network will be completed by the end of 1999, and is expected to connect with the National Science Foundation's high-speed Backbone Network Service (vBNS). Vice President Al Gore recently called Internet2 the "most advanced and far-reaching research and education network in the world."
Not to be confused with the Next Generation Internet Initiative (NGI), Internet2 does have similar goals, and both networks expect to operate at speeds 100 to 1,000 times faster than the Internet proper.
The director of the Center will be Joe Mambretti, currently the director of the Metropolitan Research and Education Network (MREN), a network that supports advanced research applications requiring high performance and high bandwidth.
The Center will have multiple sites on the Northwestern University campuses in Evanston and Chicago, as well as at IBM facilities.
