By Dr. Philip Baczewski, Associate Director of Academic Computing

Internet . . . 3?

If you are reading this, you are familiar with the Internet. You may or may not have heard of Internet 2. Now there's a new network being developed within the U.S. It's not called Internet 3, and it won't immediately have its bandwidth absorbed by Kazaa P2P file sharing traffic, but it may very well spur the same kind of quantum change that the original Internet caused in the last decade.

 The new network on the block was little more than a proposal  a year ago, but has a bit more substance today. On September 16, National LambdaRail, inc. issued a news release which described the deployment of a national networking infrastructure to support research efforts in the areas of science and engineering. (Included in the list of participants and potential participants is a "Texas universities consortium.")

It's called the National LambdaRail (NLR) after the wavelengths of light (or "lambdas") which are transmitted over a fiber-optic network. What's new about the NLR is that it is a network "from the ground up." The NLR is a network of "dark fiber" -- that is, fiber optic cable which is not currently carrying networking or telecommunications traffic. The NLR can apply whatever technologies are most appropriate for supporting an academic research network.

Like Internet 2, the NLR is an academic-only network. But unlike Internet 2, the NLR will initially connect supercomputing and high-speed networking centers. In this way, it is similar to the NSFNet which lead to the development of the commercial Internet that we know today. NSFNet took the concepts developed on the Department of Defense-funded ArpaNet and built a core infrastructure which could support connection by a multitude of research institutions.

Internet 2

Internet 2 was supposed to spur new developments in networking by creating a high-bandwidth network which was limited to academic institutions. This seemed like a good idea when bandwidth was snapped up by the commercial Internet as soon as it was available. With the great "Internet crash" of the late 1990s, the U.S. finds itself with an overbuilt telecommunications infrastructure making projects like the NLR possible. Internet 2 is just the regular Internet, only faster. The Internet 2 core network sees normally a maximum usage of 30%, with many links running at only 5% utilization. Providing all that bandwidth has not yet yielded a "killer application" which would justify it's existence (if you don't count Kazaa, which helped create its own killer of a sort -- an overly aggressive RIAA). With the ArpaNet, e-mail and ftp were the revolutionary technologies. With NSFNet, it was the World Wide Web (WWW).

Remember when?

Anybody remember how the World Wide Web was invented? In 1990, Tim Berners-Lee implemented a design he had begun describing in 1980. The technology was intended to help disseminate scientific research information of the type produced by CERN, the European particle physics laboratory.

The other part of the picture was Mosaic, a program developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (NCSA). Mosaic, the foundation on which the popular Netscape browser was built, was the first widely available program which could take advantage of the WWW ability to mix text, graphics, and hyperlinks within the same application window. From this spark, the Internet we know today exploded.

Back to the Future

The NLR's emphasis on connecting research institutions seems similar to the NSFNet's initial role of connecting Supercomputing and research centers in the U.S. The NLR may provide a boost to the TeraGrid initiative which seeks to build and provide a distributed processing network of supercomputer proportions. Such a resource could yield dramatic advances in areas such as weather modeling and biochemistry. Maybe supercomputing won't change the world, but as we've seen from the NSFNet and the U.S. space program, sometimes, it's the supporting technology which has the most long-standing and life-altering affect on society (remember Tang?). If the NLR really does deploy and make available significantly new technologies, the side affects can only be imagined. Maybe in 10 years you'll be able to read this column as soon as I think it onto the net. You never know...