Universities to Unveil Plan for Super-Network
A consortium of California universities will unveil details today of a super-high-speed, $15-million computer network that will carry data more than 100 times faster than today’s Internet.
The California Research and Education Network, or CalREN-2, will primarily serve academic institutions throughout the state that have been squeezed off the Internet as it has gained popularity among commercial users.
The Corp. for Education Network Initiatives in California--a nonprofit group that includes the University of California and Cal State University systems, along with Caltech, USC and Stanford--expects to have the network running by June, with additional features coming online throughout the year.
When CalREN-2 is up and running, it will enable new kinds of research and educational applications that are not feasible over current networks, said M. Stuart Lynn, president and chairman of the Oakland-based group that is leading the project.
For example, researchers around the state will be able to operate and collect data from specialized instruments in distant labs, like the sophisticated electron microscope at UC Riverside and the telescope at the Keck Observatory in Hawaii that is managed in part by Caltech and UC Santa Cruz. Health-care researchers will also be able to access vast stores of clinical images available at member universities and share supercomputing resources throughout the state.
Some of CalREN-2’s advanced networking technologies will be incorporated into the Internet2 project to link universities across the country on a separate all-academic network. Eventually, they will be applied to the commercial Internet used by the public.
“We expect many of the things we’re doing to filter into the public network and benefit everyone in California,” said Lynn, who is also associate vice president for information resources and communication for the UC system.
The heart of CalREN-2 will consist of two fiber-optic rings serving clusters of schools in the Los Angeles Basin and the San Francisco Bay Area with network connections 1,350 times bigger than the T1 lines typically used by businesses, said Gary Rath, public-sector vice president for Pacific Bell in San Ramon. An additional ring at the San Diego Supercomputing Center will connect UC San Diego and San Diego State University to the network, which will link to the National Science Foundation’s very-high-speed Backbone Network Service, or vBNS.
Pacific Bell and Qwest Communications will build the fiber-optic network and Cisco Systems will provide routing and switching equipment. GTE and Northern Telecom will also help build pieces of the network. The nonprofit group will buy the equipment at discounted prices, Lynn said.
When it is operational, CalREN-2 will be able to transmit data at speeds ranging from 622 megabits to 2.4 gigabits per second. That is fast enough to download an entire 30-volume encyclopedia in less than two seconds.
“We will be on the frontier in terms of technology,” Lynn said.
But it’s not just speed and the size of its pipes that will set the network apart. CalREN-2 will also employ experimental protocols that will use network resources more efficiently.
In order to improve the quality of service, applications like videoconferencing that require more network capacity will take precedence over tasks that use fewer resources, such as sending and receiving electronic mail. That will ensure that every application works as expected, even if many people are using the network at the same time.
CalREN-2 will also use a technology called multicasting to reduce congestion on the network. For example, when a person in San Diego sends e-mail to 100 recipients in San Francisco over the Internet, 100 copies of the message must traverse the state. With multicasting, the message would be sent to San Francisco only once, and the copies would be made when it got there.
“The universities are focused not just on making big, fast networks, but on making smarter networks,” said Greg Wood, communications director for the Internet2 project in Washington, D.C.
Both features of CalREN-2 are important for academic researchers trying to push the boundaries of computer networking, said Michael McLean, manager of customer support for 4CNet, which serves the Cal State and community college campuses.
“We are seeing an ever-increasing amount of demand” for network capacity, said McLean, who is based in Los Alamitos. “Every time we build more, it gets used.”
At USC, professors are eager to use the network to access the supercomputers in San Diego, said John Silvester, vice provost for scholarly technology. Faculty at USC’s Health Sciences campus are eager to use the network for telemedicine applications, while those in the School of Cinema/Television look forward to remote editing of movies, he said.
But CalREN-2 won’t be limited to California’s universities. Locally, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena and USC’s Information Sciences Institute in Marina del Rey will be connected, as will the Lawrence Livermore, Lawrence Berkeley and Los Alamos national laboratories that are managed by the University of California.
Later, CalREN-2 will connect via the vBNS network to other regional academic clusters around the country being nurtured by Internet2. Ultimately, the best of the technology will be made available to the public.
Woods, of the Internet2 project, predicts that many of the advanced protocols will be incorporated into the Internet in five to seven years. Pacific Bell’s Rath said he would be watching CalREN-2 “really, really closely” to find technologies that could improve his company’s data and voice networks.
The universities involved in CalREN-2 have won $4.5 million in grants from the National Science Foundation, and they will pay the balance of the $15-million cost out of their own pockets over three years, Lynn said.
