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INDIANA UNIVERSITY CONNECTS TO INTERNET 2
INDIANAPOLIS -- Indiana University and Ameritech announced today (April 9) that IU has been successfully connected to the National Science Foundation's high-speed research Internet, the very high performance Backbone Network Service (vBNS), at a speed thousands of times faster than standard modems. This NSF-funded connection also connects IU to the Metropolitan Research and Education (MREN) network in Chicago.
Access to such networks is essential to IU researchers developing innovative computer applications that involve the processing of vast amounts of data, such as in the modeling of chemical structures for pharmaceutical applications, the simulations of colliding galaxies, and the visualization of complex medical procedures.
These networks rapidly move data between geographically separated facilities and allow information to be shared with researchers worldwide. They move data at speeds hundreds of times faster than the present commodity Internet, which has become heavily congested and overloaded.
IU Vice President for Information Technology Michael McRobbie said, "This connection gives every member of IU access to the vBNS, MREN and other national and international networks that will form the basis of Internet 2 -- the national networking infrastructure that will sustain the American higher education community in the next century. This is a major enhancement of IU's research infrastructure. IU now joins a number of other prestigious research institutions that are also connected to the vBNS. This opens up enormous new possibilities for collaboration between them and IU."
As part of its partnership with IU, Ameritech has established a "gigaPoP" in Indianapolis. This is a concentration point where high-speed network connections from universities, industry and government in Indiana and the region can exchange traffic and where their traffic is aggregated to be sent interstate to other high-speed networks.
The establishment of this gigaPoP is the beginning of the emergence of Indianapolis as a major regional hub for next-generation Internet data services. IU's Bloomington and Indianapolis campuses both have Ameritech-supplied high-speed connections to the Indianapolis gigaPoP.
Kent Lebherz, president of Ameritech Indiana, added that Ameritech was delighted to be partnering with IU to establish its Internet 2 infrastructure. "We believe this initiative will lead to Indianapolis becoming the electronic crossroads of America in the same way it has been the crossroads in the more traditional areas of transportation," he said.
IU's partnership with Ameritech is the third major partnership initiative announced by the university over the past few months, and follows hard on the heels of its recently announced Microsoft Enterprise License Agreement and the joint establishment with Cisco Systems of a Cisco training facility at IUPUI. These partnerships will forge much closer links between these companies and IU and will provide IU students access to technology and resources that are in widespread use in business and industry.
The announcement of IU's vBNS connection was made at a special conference co-sponsored by Cisco, "Internet 2 and Indiana University," held today (April 9) at the University Place Conference Center in Indianapolis. The conference provided the IU community with comprehensive coverage and a survey of resources and facilities now available in this area.
Speakers included some of the leading national policymakers and developers of the vBNS, Internet 2, and the Next Generation Internet (NGI): Kay Howell, director of the National Coordination Office for Computing, Information and Communications in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy; Steve Goldstein, program director in the NSF Division of Advanced Networking and Infrastructure Research; and Ted Hanss, director of Applications Development for Internet 2.
Established in April 1995, the vBNS is run under a five-year cooperative agreement between MCI and the National Science Foundation to provide a high-speed network for research applications. Currently, it connects the two NSF supercomputing centers and around 50 major research institutions. Another 50 are expected to join soon. IU was awarded a grant by NSF for connection to the vBNS in May 1997.
The Chicago-based MREN is one of the world's most advanced high-performance broadband networks focused on providing advanced digital communications for leading-edge research and educational applications.
IU is one of the oldest state universities in the Midwest and was recently ranked one of the 10 best research institutions in the United States. It is also one of the largest universities in the U.S., with over 100,000 students, faculty and staff on eight campuses. The residential campus at Bloomington and the urban campus at Indianapolis are the largest. The others are located in Fort Wayne, Gary, Kokomo, New Albany, Richmond and South Bend, with courses offered at many other sites. More than 80 percent of Indiana's population lives within a 50-mile radius of an IU campus.
Ameritech serves millions of customers in 50 states and 40 countries. It provides a full range of communications services, including local and long distance telephone, cellular, paging, security monitoring, cable TV, Internet services and more. One of the world's 100 largest companies, Ameritech www.ameritech.com has 74,000 employees, one million shareowners and more than $25 billion in assets.
(Erik Novak, Office of Communications and Marketing, 812-855-0089 or 812-855-3911, enovak@indiana.edu or Jim Williams, University Information Technology Services, 812-855-5742, william@indiana.edu)