NSF PR 98-77 - November 20, 1998
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NSF Funds Advanced Internet Research Projects
The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded eight
grants worth roughly $6 million to support research
that will make the Internet of the future a faster,
more reliable, more flexible and more secure communications
medium.
The grants, made as part of the Clinton Administration's
Next Generation Internet (NGI) initiative, will support
research into such problems as: how to make the global
computer network carry far more information at vastly
higher rates of speed; how to control 'gridlock' on
the World Wide Web; and how to create secure "intelligent
agents," software tools that could not only search
for information independently, but, more importantly,
keep what they find confidential.
George Strawn, director of NSF's Division of Advanced
Networking Infrastructure and Research, noted that
with this round of grants, NSF moves into a new phase
of support for advanced Internet research. The division
currently funds university connections to the very
high performance Backbone Network Service (vBNS) to
widen access to high-speed Internet service in university
research.
Some of the new NSF grants will support research into
powerful new hardware and software that will make
the Internet capable of sending huge amounts of data
at very high speeds.
Research on one project at the University of California
at San Diego, will develop a prototype network that
uses using optical fibers to send information at rates
as high as one terabit per second. A terabit is one
trillion "bits" of information. By comparison, a high-speed
home computer modem typically handles less than 50,000
bits per second. At Stanford University, scientists
in a second project will attempt to develop a router
-- a computer that insures that information is sent
to the correct destination -- fast enough to handle
such traffic reliably.
"You've got to attack both problems at once or it's
possible that you might create more bottlenecks than
you solve," Strawn noted.
In a third project at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign,
researchers will develop a general theory for controlling
congestion on high-speed networks. Researchers from
the University of California at Berkeley, meanwhile,
hope to rework the software that was largely developed
ad hoc to allow computers to communicate on the Web
to make it more reliable.
NGI is a multi-agency, federal research and development
program that aims to advance networking technologies
and new applications through: support for enhanced
networking research; deployment of national testbed
networks that are 100 to 1,000 times faster than existing
technologies; and research into scientific applications
of high-performance computing.
The NSF-supported research also is expected to make
the Internet more flexible by allowing future users
to reliably connect to the network from mobile computers
wherever they happen to be. Several projects will
allow users to connect to the net not only through
existing technologies, such as desktop computers and
supercomputers, but through wireless networks.
-NSF-
Attachment: List of new
advanced Internet research grants
Attachment
Institutions Receiving NSF Grants for Next Generation
Internet
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