Internet II members working toward cyberspace future

Mississippi State is one of the 98 universities in the charter group of institutions working to develop a next-generation Internet that will be at least 100 times as fast as today's system.

Representatives of the charter members of Internet II, including Mike Rackley, director of Systems and Networks at Mississippi State, met in San Francisco in December to discuss technical issues and make plans for development of the new system.

Janie Tollison, operations mamager, and Frank Peters, manager, UNIX system, discuss the latest edition to Systems & Networks -- the new UNIX system

Supporters hope Internet II will allow faculty and researchers to develop totally new tools, much like the existing Internet spawned the World Wide Web. Internet II development is expected to rely on participating universities and research agencies joining forces to build extremely high-speed regional networks.

Each of these shared regional networks of the Internet II infrastructure would be known as a "gigapop," which stands for "gigabit capacity point of presence." The number of gigapops in the system may eventually number between 20 and 50.

A gigabit connection can offer speeds hundreds of times as fast as today's typical Internet connection. A "point of presence" refers to a local or nearby site at which a process is taking place, like getting information via telephone without incurring long-distance charges.

In addition to contributing to the development of regional gigapops, participants will need to provide a high-speed connection between the gigapop and campus networks and upgrade connections to individual campus users.

Participating universities have discussed committing $500,000 per institution for each of the next three years. That would provide funding of about $150 million for the effort, although estimates of the total cost run to $500 million and higher. President Clinton has proposed spending $100 million a year in federal funds in support of the effort for each of the next five years.

Some institutions, including Mississippi State, already have made major investments in networking and others would spend similar amounts anyway to improve campus networking.

Southern institutions participating in Internet II so far include Clemson, Duke, Emory, Florida A&M, Florida Atlantic, Florida International, Florida State, George Mason, George Washington, Georgia Tech, Georgia State, Mississippi State, North Carolina State, Old Dominion, Tulane, Alabama, Alabama at Birmingham, Arkansas, Central Florida, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina at Chapel Hill, South Florida, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, Vanderbilt, and Virginia Tech.

"Everything ages, and the Internet is straining under its growing popularity," President Clinton said in announcing the initiative during last fall's campaign. "Like any other piece of critical infrastructure, it has to be repaired and upgraded to meet all our education, medical, and national-security needs."

One major goal of Internet II would be to eliminate the bottlenecks that sometimes frustrate users while providing much-expanded resources for faculty and researchers in universities and government agencies.

Federal agencies that will likely help finance and develop Internet II include the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy, NASA, the Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency, and the National Institutes of Health. The Environmental Protection Agency and the Commerce Department may also play a role.

The same agencies were involved in the development of the High Performance

Computing and Communications program which broadened access to the Internet and helped lead to such Internet tools as World Wide Web browsing software.

Mississippi State also is cooperating with five other universities-Louisiana State, Alabama, Kentucky, West Virginia and South Carolina-to create a high-speed, wide-area ATM network connecting the six campuses.

The SEPSCOR (Southeastern Partnership to Share Computational Resources) research project will be an experimental network to be used as a test bed for network applications requiring the transmission of large volumes of data, especially supercomputer-based applications. Installation of the network has begun and it is expected to be operational within a few weeks.

"The recently completed Internet and campus backbone upgrades, as well as the SEPSCOR network, are consistent with the technologies envisioned for Internet II," Rackley said. "We're well on the way to creating the technological foundation that will carry us well into the next century."