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NSF PR 97-39 - May 20, 1997
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NSF Approves New Connections to High-Speed Computer
Network
Lays the Groundwork for the Internet
of the Future
The National Science Foundation (NSF) has made grants
to 35 research institutions across the United States
that will allow them to connect to NSF's very high
speed Backbone Network Service (vBNS), an extremely
sophisticated telecommunications system that enables
scientists across the continent to share powerful
computing resources.
The new grants move the nation one step closer to
a newer, high-speed version of the Internet, the global
network of computer networks. The 21 two-year grants,
made both to individual institutions and to consortiums
of research universities, range from approximately
$350,000 to $3.8 million, depending on the number
of institutions involved. The total for all 21 grants
is $12.3 million.
MCI Communications Corp., with headquarters in Washington,
D.C., provides the vBNS under the terms of a cooperative
agreement with NSF.
The new connections will allow researchers to make
use of powerful supercomputers at remote locations
to perform complex calculations or to conduct simulations
that would be extremely difficult, if not impossible,
to carry out over conventional telecommunications
networks.
The vBNS is capable of transmitting vastly larger
amounts of data much more quickly than existing networks.
It can transmit as many as 622 million bits per second.
A bit is the smallest unit of information in a computer.
The vBNS eventually will be capable of transmitting
2.4 billion bits per second. By comparison, the average
modem in a home personal computer transmits 28,800
bits per second.
This large capacity allows scientists to run more
accurate and comprehensive simulations of natural
phenomena interactively or to collect and analyze
elaborate sets of data from geographically dispersed
remote sensors. Researchers at widely separated institutions
also will be able to use the vBNS connections to simultaneously
collaborate on studies of very complex phenomena,
both real and simulated, including rapidly changing
weather patterns and collisions of galaxies.
The new round of grants brings to 64 the number of
institutions linked to the vBNS. "We are now more
than half of the way to our goal of connecting the
top 100 research institutions," said Mark Luker, who
directs the NSFNET program. NSFNET was the test-bed
and the original backbone of the existing Internet,
until it was decommissioned in 1995.
NSF's high-performance connections to the vBNS will
play a central role in achieving a major goal of the
Clinton Administration's "Next Generation Internet"
initiative by linking roughly 100 leading universities
and their research partners. The network will facilitate
the joint development of software applications and
communications technologies for the Internet of the
future.
In a closely related development, "Internet 2," a
consortium of universities committed to the development
of advanced networking to support future educational
applications of telecommunications and technology,
has designated the vBNS its initial telecommunications
network.
As more and increasingly sophisticated software tools
are developed for the Internet, the demand for high
performance connections grows, especially among scientific
researchers and educators. "With vBNS, NSF is continuing
the tradition we began with the NSFNET backbone of
pushing networking to the limits in support of the
academic research community, while enabling the transfer
of cutting-edge technology to the commercial realm,"
Luker said.
Attachment: Institutions
Receiving vBNS Grants
Fact Sheet:
Applications of the vBNS in Research and Education
Attachment
Institutions Receiving vBNS Grants
The following list of institutions received the latest
round of high-performance connection grants. For more
information about specific grants, please contact
the public affairs office at the individual institutions.
- Dartmouth College
- Georgia State University
- Harvard University
- Indiana University at Bloomington
- Johns Hopkins University
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology
- MCNC ( includes Duke University; North Carolina
State University; University of North Carolina,
Chapel Hill; and the North Carolina Supercomputing
Center)
- Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey
- Texas A&M University (also includes the Institute
for Biosciences and Technology at Houston)
- The Regents of the University of California, for
the Consortium for Education Network Initiatives
in California (CENIC). Includes University of
California campuses at Berkeley, Davis, Irvine,
Riverside, San Francisco, Santa Barbara and Santa
Cruz; and the following private institutions:
Stanford University, California Institute of Technology,
the University of Southern California (USC) and
USC's Information Sciences Institute.
- University of Arizona
- University of Kentucky
- University of Maryland, Baltimore County
- University of New Mexico
- University of Notre Dame
- University of Tennessee, Knoxville
- University of Texas at Austin
- University of Utah
- University of Wisconsin - Madison
- Vanderbilt University
- Yale University
Also see the backgrounders on The
Internet: Next Generation.
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