National Science Foundation Continues TransPAC Funding

BLOOMINGTON, IN -- Indiana University today announced that the National Science Foundation (NSF) has extended funding for TransPAC®, the high-speed international Internet service connecting research and education networks in the Asia Pacific to those in the United States. Principal Investigator for TransPAC in the US is Dr. Michael A. McRobbie, Indiana University Vice President for Information Technology & CIO and Vice President for Research.

"As a vehicle for encouraging collaborations between groups in the US and the Asia-Pacific, TransPAC has had notable success. We are pleased that the NSF has extended funding for TransPAC," Dr. McRobbie said. "This extension supports the critical international collaborations between researchers in the United States and those in the Asia Pacific in digitally enabled science."

TransPAC supports such international collaborations as the Grid Physics Network (GriPhyN) for distribution and analysis of experimental results in high energy physics; the Asia-Pacific Bioinformatics Network, providing genomic data, computational resources, and community support for medical and biological research; the Joint Program for Arctic Atmosphere Observation between laboratories at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and the Communications Research Laboratory in Japan; and the Japan-US collaboration in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.

"NSF's continued co-funding of international links clearly underscores the importance of global e-science collaborations and the growing dependence on shared cyberinfrastructure resources for complex problem solving," said Tom DeFanti, principal investigator of the NSF-supported StarLight optical Internet exchange in Chicago, where TransPAC connects in North America.

For the past five years, the TransPAC consortium has connected research and education networks in the Asia Pacific associated with the Asia Pacific Advanced Network (APAN) to the Internet2 Abilene network, the vBNS, US federal networks, and other global international research and education networks. Operational support for TransPAC is provided in the US by Indiana University's Global Research Network Operations Center (Global NOC®) and in Japan by KDDI Corporation's APAN network operations center. International circuits for TransPAC are provided by KDDI Corporation.

In 1998, the NSF awarded $10 million over five years to fund TransPAC. The Japan Science and Technology Corp. in 1999 awarded $10 million over five years to double the capacity of TransPAC. In 2002, TransPAC increased bandwidth available for researchers from 155Mbps (megabits per second) to 1.244Gbps (gigabits per second). The funding extension by the NSF provides $1.75M over the next year for continued operational support. In the coming year, plans include increasing TransPAC bandwidth capacity at no increase in cost from the current 1.244Gbps to 5Gbps (gigabits per second), more than quadrupling capacity for researchers.

About Indiana University
Indiana University is one of the oldest state universities in the Midwest and also one of the largest universities in the United States with more than 110,000 students, faculty and staff on eight campuses. IU has a growing national and international reputation in the area of information technology and is a national and international leader in advanced networking. IU, at its Indianapolis campus, is home to the Abilene Network Operations Center as well as the Global Research Network Operations Center (Global NOC®).

About TransPAC
TransPAC® offers its high-bandwidth research network to nearly 100 Asia-Pacific and United States educational institutions and research laboratories for testing a range of applications, including astronomy, molecular biology, high-energy physics, medicine, meteorology, computational science, and distance learning.

About KDDI
KDDI Corporation, with subsidiaries and offices in countries around the world, provides high-quality, seamless network service that interconnects every corner of the globe. The comprehensive support of KDDI not only covers network services such as leased circuits and frame relay/cell relay services but also extends to system integration and housing of customer telecom facilities. Network operation centers in Tokyo, New York, Los Angeles and London provide 24/7 operations and monitoring of customer networks. For more information, see http://www.apan.net/.

About the Global NOC
The Global Research Network Operations Center (Global NOC®) at Indiana University manages the international network connections from advanced research and education networks in the Asia/Pacific, Europe, Russia, and South America to the Science Technology and Research Transit Access Point (STAR TAP) and the leading US high-performance research and education networks such as Abilene (the network that supports the Internet2 project), the NSF's very high performance Backbone Network System (vBNS) and the Department of Energy's ESnet.

About StarLight
StarLight^SM, the optical STAR TAP^SM initiative, is an advanced optical infrastructure and proving ground for network services optimized for high-performance applications.

Contact:
Christine Fitzpatrick
Indiana University OVPIT
cfitzpat @ iu.edu
ph: +1.317.278.1818