With a three-year, $1.2 million grant from the National Science Foundation, three Illinois research institutions are working as partners with Ameritech Advanced Data Services (AADS) to establish an interconnection point that will enable the exchange of high-speed network traffic among research institutions worldwide.

The University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) and its partners, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Argonne National Laboratory, are collaborating with AADS to employ its high-speed interconnection switch in Chicago to connect U.S. research networks with international ones. Called STAR TAP -- Science, Technology And Research Transit Access Point -- this interconnection will open the way for international collaborations on such computationally demanding and data-intensive topics as global climate change, protein structures, nanomaterials, video streaming, and interactive virtual reality.

"The scientific community is worldwide," says the project's principal investigator, Tom DeFanti, director of the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) at UIC and an associate director at NCSA. "The United States can't afford to do the whole world's science, so it makes sense to collaborate, and networks are synonymous with collaboration."

Among the international collaborative efforts STAR TAP will support is the G7's program on Global Interoperability of Broadband Networks (GIBN). The G7 is the so-called group of seven highly industrialized countries: Japan, Canada, United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Italy. Last year, more than 55 international teams of researchers proposed projects that required broadband connectivity for connections through the GIBN initiative. These applications and others will be revisited to stress test the different parts of the STAR TAP system.

In 1995 EVL, NCSA and Argonne led the development of a high-performance network testbed for SC'95, that demonstrated the need for interoperability and interconnectivity. Of the more than 60 research teams who participated in what was called I-WAY, over half proposed a total of 55 international collaborations to GIBN.

"This will be the first opportunity to enable advanced research collaborations of global reach by interconnecting European, South American, and Asian-Pacific high-performance networks with North American counterparts and with each other," says Steve Goldstein, NSF's program officer for STAR TAP. "STAR TAP will be an international proving ground for enabling next-generation networked applications."

Already several countries have shown an interest in STAR TAP, with the first connections between NSF's very high-performance Backbone Network Service (vBNS) and the Canadian Network for the Advancement of Research, Industry and Education (CANARIE). The vBNS is a research network operated as a partnership between NSF and MCI that connects 30 research institutions at up to 622 Mbps. Within two years the number of institutions hooked to vBNS will climb to 100. CANARIE hooked into the Metropolitan Research and Education Network (MREN) at the Ameritech switch in December in anticipation of STAR TAP. According to CANARIE's Bill St. Arnaud, STAR TAP will simplify networking for the large volume of research conducted between Canada and the United States as well as among other foreign countries.

"We've done about 30 international projects during the last two years and wanted to move to a persistent type of application, otherwise the researchers spend their time and money establishing connections rather than concentrating on their projects," says St. Arnaud.

Representatives of both the Department of Energy's Energy Sciences Network (ESnet) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's NASA Research and Education Network (NREN) also have expressed interest in connecting at the STAR TAP. This greater access to U.S. research institutions will be welcomed by international partners who, in the past, have expressed frustration in not being able to connect to all U.S. high-performance networks at a single place.

Although international networks are increasingly important to research, researchers often have to resort to the Internet for transmitting data internationally or to devote months of research time and dollars negotiating for high-performance connections. These latter connections, to which St. Arnaud referred, typically are dismantled when a project ends and must be renegotiated for each subsequent project. The STAR TAP project will not only offer a persistent switch for international connections but will develop technology for improving the speed and performance of interconnected, high-performance networks.

A switch is a large computer into which network cables are connected so that they can exchange data, much like an interchange on a highway or a traffic circle. The STAR TAP switch will operate at speeds of up to 622 Mbps -- and uses ATM protocols, the rules governing the transmission of data, for direct switching and IP protocols for routing capabilities, which offer maximum flexibility. STAR TAP will aggressively integrate such new services as Resource Reservation Protocol (RSVP) and improved multicasting (one-to-many users). The STAR TAP team will create new tools for diagnostics, tracking usage, and providing direct feedback on performance. Such statistics will help scientists and network engineers understand the bandwidth requirements of various applications so that they may tune both the application and the network for optimal performance.

This emphasis on performance is part of a larger push toward building so-called "smarter" networks. As the history of the Internet indicates, greater bandwidth is only a temporary solution for slow, congested networks. More efficient use of bandwidth is becoming as important as bandwidth itself.

"Networks are usually designed to be static. What we want to design is one that can adjust to the requirements of the application and the application to the network," says Linda Winkler, one of two network engineers from Argonne whose time is being donated to STAR TAP. She and NCSA's Paul Zawada will coordinate the technical aspects of designing and implementing STAR TAP. An example of a smart network, says Winkler, is one that can respond to the bandwidth needs of an application and adjust the bandwidth accordingly. "That is a more efficient use of bandwidth than reserving bandwidth based on the requirements of the most data-intensive portions of the application. Someday applications may have code imbedded in them that signals the network of its requirements."

A shorter term goal more within the reach of the STAR TAP grant is building tools for assuring the quality of service.

"If I send voice over the network, I want my data packets to arrive together and in the right order, otherwise you won't understand the message, it's jumbled," says Goldstein. "We need high bandwidth because the applications need speed. But high bandwidth isn't enough. Unless you can reserve resources to provide the proper performance quality, you will just get more bumper-to-bumper traffic jams as use expands to fill available capacity."

Successfully implementing these new capabilities coupled with the technological issues surrounding the exchange of traffic at these high speeds are crucial to building faster, more reliable networks, including commercial networks, which is what attracted AADS to the project. AADS is donating staff and equipment and has established a test lab it will operate in conjunction with the STAR TAP management team so that it can get a head start on this emerging networking technology.

AADS has a similar arrangement with MREN, a consortium of seven Chicago-area research institution that collectively purchase and manage a high-bandwidth network connection. Chicago was chosen as the site for the STAR TAP connection because of its central location and the model for network management and collaboration provided by MREN.

Traffic measurements, performance statistics, new network management tools, and guides for participating in international applications and connecting to the STAR TAP will soon be available at this website.

UIC's EVL advances research in computer graphics and interactive techniques through its unique interdisciplinary blend of engineering, science, and art; its students receive MS, PhD and MFA degrees through the UIC Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department and the UIC School of Art and Design.

The Electronics and Computing Technologies Division and Mathematics and Computer Science Division of Argonne National Laboratory, a U.S. Department of Energy multi-program laboratory operated by the University of Chicago, is located 25 miles southwest of Chicago, a national hub for telecommunications, transportation, manufacturing, research and education. Argonne is recognized internationally as a center for basic, applied, and industrial research and development, with a long history of operating national user facilities. Argonne, working with AADS, pioneered MREN in 1994.