KOREN/KREONet2, a cooperative advanced research network in Korea, connected to STAR TAP today, and began sending data to its research partners in North America, South America and Europe.

Although Korea currently supports two other links to the US dedicated to education and research traffic, the congested lines are unable to support intensive joint research projects across the Pacific. STAR TAP, the Chicago-based, next-generation universal exchange point, now gives Korean researchers high-speed access to over 180 US universities and national laboratories, and most of the world's premier networks.

"Korea is aggressively pursuing excellence in research, which brings with it a growing demand for overseas data exchange between advanced research institutions," said KREONet2 director Ok-Hwan Byeon. "The new STAR TAP link should be faster and more reliable than what was previously available to our research community."

The link will support high-end research projects at the nearly 200 research institutions linked by KOREN/KREONet2. "We hope to forge more partnerships in the US and Korea that require advanced connectivity, and increase our overall number of bilateral research collaborations worldwide," said Byeon.

"Korea is poised to join the expanding international research community that relies on high-performance networking and computing resources," said STAR TAP principal investigator Tom DeFanti. Using this link, Korea plans to participate in multicast, traffic measurement, web cache and IPv6 testing with international research networks.

KOREN/KREONet2 enables Korean university and government-based researchers to perform international collaborative research in high-end science and technology, including bioinformatics, meteorology, physics, environment, life science, pharmaceutical development and Grid development.

One example is the Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information (KISTI), which recently acquired a four teraflop-scale supercomputer, virtual reality equipment and high-tech bioinformatics servers, and is actively seeking partners around the world. Immediate candidates include University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign's National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) and University of Illinois at Chicago's Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL).

In its initial phase, the KOREN/KREONet2 intercontinental link to STAR TAP will have the bandwidth of DS-3 (45Mbps). Depending on bandwidth demand from the advanced projects utilizing the link, it will be progressively upgraded to OC-3 (155Mbps).

About STAR TAP The Science, Technology, And Research Transit Access Point, or STAR TAP, is a proving ground for long-term interconnection and interoperability of advanced international networking. STAR TAP is made possible by major funding from the US National Science Foundation to the University of Illinois at Chicago. See: http://www.startap.net

Contact:
Laura Wolf
Electronic Visualization Laboratory
laura@evl.uic.edu