Full Speed ahead
Internet2 members are heading toward a wide-open future. What’s in it for you?
By Roger Smith
 The Internet is plagued by spam, viruses, denial-of-service attacks, and other problems that can cripple vital Web servers worldwide. It also has to cope with the growing demand for URLs to accommodate all kinds of new devices. All of this has many people saying today’s all-purpose Internet is about to run out of gas.
This isn’t a new message, but with governments and companies alike considering possibilities for the Internet’s future, the conversation is getting a little more charged.
One of the earliest initiatives to overhaul the Internet originated a dozen years ago, well before the age of malware. The Internet2 project was formed in 1996 when 34 university researchers met in a Chicago hotel to discuss ways to develop and implement a new Internet, which they called Internet2. The project has grown into a nonprofit consortium formally administered by the University Corporation for Advanced Internet Development. That group provides a nationwide high-performance 100-Gbps network backbone to nearly 300 member organizations and more than 50,000 research and educational institutions, including colleges, high schools, museums, and libraries.
Beyond providing turbocharged network capacity, Internet2 and its members are developing, deploying, and using networking technologies that tap protocols such as IPv6 to access an astronomical amount of new URL address space, as well as a host of middleware and security capabilities such as federated authentication, and advanced applications such as high-definition videoconferencing. Software such as Internet2 Detective lets users test their connection, gauge the bandwidth they need, and perform other functions (see diagram, below).
These technologies will provide a lot more than just a faster Web or speedier e-mail—they’ll let people use networking in ways that aren’t possible via the existing global commercial Internet. Among the possibilities: digital libraries, virtual laboratories, distance and independent learning, and health applications.
Accelerated Research
One of the highest-profile projects to exploit Internet2 resources is CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, the particle accelerator in Switzerland and France, a massive facility that will let physicists around the world investigate the origins of the universe. Internet2’s high-speed network is expected to play a major role in testing various predictions of high-energy physics when the collider becomes fully operational next year.
As the world’s largest scientific research project, the collider is expected to produce about 15 million GB of data annually for scientists to analyze. More than 70 Internet2 university members and 3,000 U.S. researchers will participate in the research, with each expected to download or transmit about 2 TB of data during a four-hour window every two weeks. Internet2’s Dynamic Circuit Network, or DCN, will give dedicated, customizable, on-demand bandwidth to each researcher.
Shawn McKee, a high-energy astrophysicist at the University of Michigan, is a research scientist participating in the project. McKee’s work will require the transfer of massive amounts of data in short windows of time between his laboratory in Ann Arbor and the Brookhaven National Laboratory, in Upton, N.Y. McKee plans to use the Internet2 Dynamic Circuit Network, which lets users set up short-term dedicated network paths on demand for high-performance data transfers.
DCN will significantly boost the productivity and efficiency of the work, McKee says. “The overall distributed system becomes more effective and efficient, which means more users can get their work done and resources are more highly utilized.”
Streaming high-quality digital video over advanced networks is a key part of a good many Internet2 applications, whether in the arts, sciences, or health care. One example is the Immersion Presents science education program, founded by famed oceanographer and explorer Robert Ballard, at Connecticut’s Mystic Aquarium. Immersion Presents lets museum visitors control three video cameras on an underwater submersible in the Monterey Bay, Calif., marine sanctuary.
Live video is encoded into DVD-quality MPEG-2 and sent at an average rate of 6 Mbps to the University of California, Santa Cruz. It then travels over Internet2 networks to the University of Connecticut and to the Mystic Aquarium.
Another rapidly expanding Internet2 initiative is InCommon, a nationwide U.S. identity management federation for higher education that has close to 2 million users at more than 80 higher education institutions and service providers. InCommon Federation leverages a university’s identity management system to let students, staff, and faculty access online resources, including Apple’s popular iTunes U service, which provides lecture podcasts and other course materials that students can listen to or view from a computer, iPod, or iPhone.
InCommon is the verification method for U.S. students to access software in Microsoft’s DreamSpark program, which provides development and design tools free to students in 10 countries. Microsoft chose to work with InCommon rather than individual campuses because it was a “low-overhead,” scalable way to get key tools in the hands of young developers likely to create the next generation of applications, says program manager Scott Blackwell.
“We see the emergence of global federations in higher education as a great opportunity to leverage campus services,” Blackwell says.
The Internet2 K20 Initiative extends Internet2 to all levels in education and has spawned Muse, a social networking tool (similar to Facebook or MySpace) that makes it much easier for K-12 teachers, museum curators, librarians, and higher-education faculty, among others, to connect with one another using advanced networked teaching and learning resources and applications.
Educators can use Muse to build online communities for specific geographic areas as well as worldwide contacts. Kathy Kraemer, a school technology coordinator in Minnesota, used Muse to create a regional page and Internet2 Users’ Group, where area teachers can gather and plan future events.
Muse has let group members become aware of each other and find ways to work together, Kraemer says. “I hope to see every Minnesota teacher use Muse as their home page for Internet2 classroom collaborations and resources,” she says.
Internet2 also supports working groups that are focused on disciplines such as radioastronomy, health sciences, and the performing arts that need advanced networking for projects such as remote instrumentation, telemedicine, and real-time, distance-independent instruction. The results can be impressive. Describing a private Internet2 lesson with London Symphony Orchestra concertmaster Gordan Nikolitch, violinist Mirabai Weismehl says, “At first I was a bit wary, but very soon I saw the immediacy of the video presentation and also the high quality and clarity of the sound. The interaction was so natural, I forgot about the camera.”
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