NERO (Network for Engineering and Research in Oregon) and NACSE (Northwest Alliance for Computational Science and Engineering) provide the basis for Oregon's participation in this project.
Today's "one size fits all" Internet does not meet national needs. Congestion and outages are increasing, due to the "growing pains" of today's commodity Internet. It's not fair for personal entertainment traffic to slow down national research or education traffic. Similarly, it's not fair for personal users to bear expense of high-speed research and education connections.
As a nation, we need to develop a networking infrastructure that can respond
to different levels of need.
Internet2 will provide better and more appropriate network capabilities to support the research and educational activities of the nation's major universities. However, it is not just a faster version of today's Internet, but will function as a limited-access R&D vehicle for experimenting with
For example, Internet2 will be used to prototype new
Further, Internet2 is designed to accelerate the hand-off of new technology to the national education community and to public (commercial) networks, so that all networks become more flexible and more efficient.
Internet2 will be instrumental in determining what future networks will be like, and how future network-based education and interaction is achieved - just as the NSFnet led development of today's Internet.
Major Internet2 hub sites will be called gigapops. Each high-capacity ("giga") point-of-presence ("pop") will be an integral part of the Internet2 backbone
The key characteristics of gigapops are:
Gigapops will be connected to each other in a ring or similar configuration. Non-research traffic, such as email, will be routed over commercial network lines. Qualifying research projects will be able to use the facilities of the vBNS.
The vBNS (very high speed Backbone Network Service) is NSF's new high-bandwidth research network, established just last year.
National, merit-based competition is used to select participating sites. Oregon State University was one of the first universities to win (see www.nacse.org/NSFconnections).
A key advantage of being a vBNS site is that users from that site may use the high-speed network links for all communications and experimentation involving other vBNS sites. (Traffic to non-vBNS sites must use other network lines.)
The NGI effort is a White House initiative outlined by Pres. Clinton in his 1997 State of the Union address.
Like Internet2, it proposes to accelerate the development and deployment of advanced networking techniques. Rather than applying to just educational institutions, however, it will also encompass major federal agencies.
The objectives of this federal initiative are:
The NGI effort will be led by the National Science Foundation, NASA, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, Dept. of Energy, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology. The NGI network will interconnect the different high-speed experimental networks run by these agencies: NSF's vBNS, NASA's NREN, Dept. of Defense's DREN, and DOE's ESNET.
For a copy with hyperlinks to other on-line information, see the NERO Web pages at Oregon State University, http://www.cs.orst.edu/internet2.
For a brief history of the Internet, see http://www.isoc.org/isoc/publications/oti/articles/seeding.html