Subject: [Fwd: NSF Funds Advanced Internet Research Projects]

From: Jeff Williams <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 20 Nov 1998 12:53:04 +0000

All,

  Point of intrest possibly?

Regards,

--
Jeffrey A. Williams
CEO/DIR. Internet Network Eng/SR. Java/CORBA Development Eng.
Information Network Eng. Group. INEG. INC.
E-Mail [email-masked]
Contact Number:  972-447-1894
Address: 5 East Kirkwood Blvd. Grapevine Texas 75208

Subject: NSF Funds Advanced Internet Research Projects
From: [email-masked]
To: [email-masked], [email-masked]
Date: Fri, 20 Nov 98 11:54:12 EST

                   NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION

Media contact:                                 November 20, 1998
Peter West                                          NSF PR 98-77
(703) 306-1070/[email-masked]

Program contact:
George Strawn
(703)306-1950/[email-masked]

          NSF FUNDS ADVANCED INTERNET RESEARCH PROJECTS

     The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded eight
grants worth roughly $6 million to support research that will
make the Internet of the future a faster, more reliable, more
flexible and more secure communications medium.

     The grants, made as part of the Clinton Administration's
Next Generation Internet (NGI) initiative, will support research
into such problems as: how to make the global computer network
carry far more information at vastly higher rates of speed; how
to control `gridlock' on the World Wide Web; and how to create
secure "intelligent agents," software tools that could not only
search for information independently, but, more importantly, keep
what they find confidential.

     George Strawn, director of NSF's Division of Advanced
Networking Infrastructure and Research, noted that with this
round of grants, NSF moves into a new phase of support for
advanced Internet research.  The division currently funds
university connections to the very high performance Backbone
Network Service (vBNS) to widen access to high-speed Internet
service in university research.

     Some of the new NSF grants will support research into
powerful new hardware and software that will make the Internet
capable of sending huge amounts of data at very high speeds.

     Research on one project at the University of California at
San Diego, will develop a prototype network that uses using
optical fibers to send information at rates as high as one
terabit per second.  A terabit is one trillion "bits" of
information.  By comparison, a high-speed home computer modem
typically handles less than 50,000 bits per second.  At Stanford
University, scientists in a second project will attempt to
develop a router -- a computer that insures that information is
sent to the correct destination -- fast enough to handle such
traffic reliably.

     "You've got to attack both problems at once or it's possible
that you might create more bottlenecks than you solve," Strawn
noted.

     In a third project at the University of Illinois, Urbana-
Champaign, researchers will develop a general theory for
controlling congestion on high-speed networks. Researchers from
the University of California at Berkeley, meanwhile, hope to
rework the software that was largely developed ad hoc to allow
computers to communicate on the Web to make it more reliable.

     NGI is a multi-agency, federal research and development
program that aims to advance networking technologies and new
applications through: support for enhanced networking research;
deployment of national testbed networks that are 100 to 1,000
times faster than existing technologies; and  research into
scientific applications of high-performance computing.

     The NSF-supported research also is expected to make the
Internet more flexible by allowing future users to reliably
connect to the network from mobile computers wherever they happen
to be.  Several projects will allow users to connect to the net
not only through existing technologies, such as desktop computers
and supercomputers, but through wireless networks.

                              -NSF-

Attachment: List of new advanced Internet research grants

              INSTITUTIONS RECEIVING NSF GRANTS FOR
                NEXT GENERATION INTERNET RESEARCH

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
University of California-San Diego
Stanford University
University of Southern California
University of Minnesota-Twin Cities
University of California at Berkeley