EUGENE–The University of Oregon will soon have access to a new and rapidly developing section of the Internet–what amounts to the fast lane of the information superhighway–thanks to a grant announced today from the National Science Foundation (NSF).

Vice President Al Gore made the announcement that the UO, along with 35 other top universities across the nation, will receive High-performance Connections awards. The $350,000 grant will be spread over a two-year period beginning Sept. 15, 1998 and expiring Oct. 31, 1999. The UO will be responsible for matching he federal grant with approximately $300,000.

"The Internet itself was originally created by and for research institutions," says John Moseley, UO Provost and vice president for academic affairs. "It is a great honor and a great tribute to the achievements of the University of Oregon to be selected to be part of the elite group of institutions that will take the Internet to the next level of power and sophistication."

"The money will be used to buy bandwidth and networking equipment to connect the UO with other research universities and federal labs," explains Joanne Hugi, director of UO campus computing. "It is part of the government’s effort to foster continued technological advances that will allow the networks we have today to mature into even more powerful tools."

The grants will allow recipient universities to link into NSF's very high-performance Backbone Network Service (vBNS) or other NSF-approved high-performance networks. This sophisticated telecommunications network runs at 622 million bits per second and has begun a transition to operation at 2.4 gigabits per second. By comparison, the average home modem operates from 28,800 to 56,600 bits per second. In addition, the vBNS is expected to be always several steps ahead of commercially available networking.

"Our connection to this system will be at what is called OC3 speed which is 155 million bits per second," Hugi says.

This high capacity network allows scientists and engineers to collect and share vast amounts of data, collaborate better across large distances and run complex equipment remotely. UO scientists already have applications awaiting access to the power of vBNS. Three examples are:

• The UO participates in the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) project. The LIGO will become part of a planned worldwide network of gravitational-wave detectors coordinated to extract information carried by gravitational waves.

• UO Earth and computer scientists are working together to develop a high-performance computing environment which will enable them to use large and varied data sets to model real systems. One current project, run in collaboration with numerous other institutions, uses tomographic imaging of the physical processes occurring at mid-ocean spreading ridges, sites at which the majority of the Earth’s ongoing crust formation takes place.

• The UO provides leadership for an international team of astronomers engaged in a large-scale observational effort. Their objective is to discover and characterize the formation and evolution of low-surface brightness galaxies.

"Our new large-format digital camera will be installed shortly at the Pine Mountain Observatory and will start basically to make a real-time sky survey that others can access almost immediately after the imaging data is acquired," explains astronomer Greg Bothun, a UO physicist and director of the Pine Mountain Observatory, who spearheads this effort. "As each image file is four-to-eight megs, high-speed connection is mandatory if the database is to be accessed efficiently and to have real value."

University connections to the vBNS are evaluated by a peer review process and approved on the basis of scientific and technical merit. The vBNS is a central element of the President's Next Generation Internet (NGI) initiative. Begun in 1995, the vBNS initiative is a five-year, $50 million effort of the federal government, which is collaborating on the project with MCI Telecommunications Corporation. NSF is spending about $12.25 million over two years in grants announced today.

UO officials expect that the vBNS connection will increase research opportunities, faculty retention and recruitment, cutting-edge applications using voice/video/data that require bandwidth beyond that delivered by the university’s current Internet connection. The only traffic on the new network will be research related. The UO will retain its current general-purpose connection to the Internet for all other network traffic.

The original Internet quickly moved from use by researchers into the widely used tool that it now is, notes Joanne Hugi. "The vBNS advances will ultimately transfer to the commodity Internet and therefore be of use to enhance the overall usefulness of the Internet for the public," she says.

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