Networking

Internet2
Where Are We Headed?

Bill Russell

Internet2 is not going to get you the latest movie listings, music or news any faster. Its purpose is to allow higher speeds and better quality of service among researchers. The current "commodity" Internet is getting congested, with researchers sharing the same pipes as commercial traffic, so Internet2 will provide a dedicated service for educational and research endeavors. Generic Internet service will still be obtained via a standard Internet Service Provider, or ISP.

The Internet is getting more and more popular as more information, products and services become available through the network. But how did it get so big in the first place?

In the 1980s, the Internet was used to connect U.S. government research labs and higher education institutions. In different parts of the country, labs and schools got together to form regional networks. NYSERNet, the New York State Education and Research Network, is one such network. It was formed by folks from NYU, Columbia, Cornell, Syracuse, Rochester and Rockefeller Universities, working with industrial research labs at Xerox and Kodak and government labs at Brook-haven and Rome, among others. There were similar nets in New England (NearNet), the southeast (SuraNet), and the rest of the country. These networks were tied together using the National Science Foundation's NSFNET, which was first run at 56 Kbps (kilobits per second) -- a speed at which new desktop modems now run. Then it was upgraded to T-1 speeds (1.5 Mbps), and then finally to T-3 (45 Mbps).

Commercial networks then developed, to provide access to businesses that wanted to get on the Internet to service their customers. Since these large commercial ISPs reduced their costs through volume discounts, they soon attracted customers of all sizes, including non-commercial sites like schools and hospitals. These ISPs had such a good price-to-performance ratio that many colleges, universities and research institutions began using them as well.

The information superhighway is just like an asphalt highway -- since the network has gotten more popular, it gets congested and has very bad traffic jams. (For example, when Netscape releases a new version of their browser, everyone is online at once trying to download it, which makes for slow connections and busy signals.) This has caused some research projects to get bogged down due to slow network links, even though NYU now has a T-3 link to NYSERNet, which at most times runs at about 20 percent usage.

The NSF has been trying to help researchers working on collaborations, with a service called the very high performance Backbone Network Service (vBNS). This original high-speed interconnection, linking NSF's supercomputing centers and NSF- specified Network Access Points, was established on April 1, 1995. A program called High Performance Computing and Communications (HPCC) was founded at the same time to provide support for institutions connecting to the vBNS and to allow access to the various supercomputing centers.

In late 1996 and early 1997, a consortium of distinguished institutions got together to form Internet2. Their purpose was to connect higher education institutions together with high-speed networking and connectivity, to foster the research collaborations that this would enable.

In various parts of the US, regional consortia were started to form gigaPoPs -- network interconnections that would work at extremely high speeds and allow regional areas to aggregate their high-speed connections to the vBNS. The vBNS is one of the ways that the Internet2 institutions will be interconnected. Consortia of gigaPoPs -- such as the East Coast GigaPoP Consortium -- will also allow the various groups from New England to Florida to interconnect.

Since the regional networks are gone for the most part, the various gigaPoP projects around the country have had to re-invent networks to get the necessary cooperation between institutions. However, here in New York, NYSERNet never disappeared. In fact, several years ago the institutions that comprise NYSERNet re-designed the network, and now New York State has a very good regional network.

In March 1997, NYSERNet institutions began work on a project entitled NYSERNet 2000, which we hope will allow New York State to have one of the most advanced gigaPoPs around.

Recently, the National Science Foundation has granted NYSERNet funds to allow us to connect to the vBNS as part of a NYSERNet 2000 consortium grant proposal submitted last year. There are now four schools in New York State that are eligible to connect to the vBNS via the NSF High Performance Computing program: NYU, Columbia, Cornell and Syracuse. Of these, only Cornell is now attached.

We are close to having contracts in place to acquire the network gear and the Sonet (Synchronous Optical Network) or ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Method) services to build a network. The connections from the NYSERNet 2000 giga-PoP to individual institutions will have a speed of 155 Mbps. We are also considering using wireless services for some of these links.

Depending on the state of the existing local networks in academic departments, NYU may have to redesign or reimplement some local network connectivity. We would change from a shared to a fully switched network. Giving each user's computer a dedicated 10 Mbps link (or better) to a robust backbone will allow users to experiment with new and exciting applications, like multi-media conferencing tools, digital libraries and real-time data visualizations in genome research, fluid dynamics and astrophysics. Even some tele-medicine applications might become fully realized as both the local and long distance networks allow end-to-end communications at high speed, over extended time and distance, with a high quality of service.

Posted May 18,1998