The series of high-speed networks expected to replace the Internet as the primary link between universities and research facilities moved a few steps closer to reality Monday.
Companies including IBM, Sun, Novell, Cisco, and StorageTek said they would chip in hardware and software for the Internet2 Digital Video Network, a video service that will form part of the larger Internet2 project.
"The day when ubiquitous digital libraries and data-intensive applications span a national grid of powerful computers and massive data repositories has been brought closer by today's announcement," said Jack Dongarra, director of the Innovative Computing Laboratory at the University of Tennessee, in a statement.
The Internet2 project aims to return researchers to the golden age of the Internet, when networks were relatively uncongested for serious research. Scientists must now share what has become the commercial Internet with millions of consumers and businesses.
The next-generation network is expected to be lightning fast. Whereas most connections to the existing Internet can move data at 1 Mbps, Internet2 is expected to support at least 100-Mbps connections.
The new network will be based at the International Center for Advanced Internet Research at Northwestern University. When it opens later this year, the center will be a testbed for industrial sectors, corporate processes, education, and personal communications.
Two other upgrades will address Internet2's massive storage requirements. The Distributed Storage Infrastructure initiative and the Middleware Initiative will help the Internet2 network store and deliver the many terabytes of data that will be used by the 133 participating universities in the course of research, teaching, and learning projects.
Internet2 is one of several next-generation Internet projects underway. The National Science Foundation's Very High Performance Backbone Service -- a joint project with MCI -- will be used as the main, cross-country pipeline, and universities will connect to it via regional gigabit capacity points of presence.
