The University of Washington today announced two major
milestones in advanced Internet connectivity for the Pacific
Northwest. Both developments are part of UW's Pacific
Northwest Gigapop project, the recipient of significant
support from the 1998 Washington State
Legislature.
First, UW became one of four inaugural
sites directly connected to the new Internet2 "Abilene"
network, a national high-performance backbone network
intended to support advanced application research and
development. The Abilene project is a collaboration of the
University Corporation for Advanced Internet Development
(UCAID), Qwest Communications, Nortel, and Cisco Systems.
UW's attachment bandwidth to the Abilene backbone network is
an impressive 622 Mbps (an OC-12c circuit in the terminology
of the underlying SONET technology) -- over 300 times the
capacity of the typical high-speed attachment deployed in
today's Internet.
Second, UW has completed its
connection to the "very high performance Backbone Network
Service" (vBNS), a complementary national high-speed research
network funded by the National Science Foundation and
operated by MCI Worldcom. Notably, UW is the first vBNS site
to attach using the more efficient "Packet-over-SONET" (POS)
transmission technology, as opposed to the earlier
Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) technology. A POS circuit
provides over 20% more Internet throughput than an ATM
circuit of the same bandwidth. UW is connected to the vBNS
at a bandwidth of 155 Mbps (OC-3c in SONET
terms).
Note: A map of both
networks is attached.
"This is terrific news for
research and educational institutions in the Northwest and
particularly in Washington State," according to Professor Ed
Lazowska, chair of the University of Washington's Department
of Computer Science & Engineering department and a member of
the Internet2 network research liaison council. "Not only
will faculty and students at UW and other Northwest
institutions benefit, but the bandwidth will stimulate
regional economic development in ways we can't begin to
anticipate." "The activation of vBNS has caused great
excitement over here," said Professor Craig Hogan, chair
of UW's Astronomy department. Astronomy researcher Thomas
Quinn observed a factor of 10-20 improvement in performance
over the vBNS compared to his prior work using the UW's
commodity Internet connection.
The University
gratefully acknowledges the substantial support that it has
received from Cisco Systems in providing state-of-the-art
routing equipment for the Abilene connection on very short
notice. The University was invited to participate in the
Abilene "alpha" network rollout in late August, and the UW's
connection to the Abilene network became operational barely
one month later - in time for this week's Internet2 meeting
and Abilene announcement today in San Francisco.
As one
demonstration of the capabilities of the Abilene network, the
Research Television consortium, a UW-led group of major
universities and corporate research centers dedicated to the
distribution of video materials featuring research and
education, is showing its very high-quality on-demand video
streaming service at the Internet2 members meeting. The
consortium is providing MPEG2 DirectTV quality video
distribution over the new Abilene backbone. "This is just
the beginning," according to Amy Philipson, who leads the
Research TV consortium. "Our goal is to push the state of
the art in video distribution and determine what the barriers
are to increasing the quality and timeliness of video content
delivery in an advanced network environment such as Abilene."
This too is a major component of the national Internet2
multimedia network and middleware partnership being announced
today at the Internet2 meeting in SF.
Both of these
national network connections are part of UW's "Pacific
NorthWest Gigapop" project. A Gigapop is a regional hub for
high-speed Internet connections and services, and provides
the foundation for efficient distribution of and access to
advanced network services in a geographic region. The UW's
Pacific Northwest Gigapop was founded earlier this year, when
the Washington State Legislature provided substantial startup
funding. These connections to the vBNS and Abilene networks
represent the first tangible results of this partnership
between UW and the state
legislature.
Ron Johnson 206 543-8252
ronj@cac.washington.edu 206 605-3021 cell
Ed Lazowska
206 543-4755 lazowska@cs.washington.edu
