SAN DIEGO, CA -- The University of California, San Diego (UCSD), and the National University of Singapore (NUS) agreed November 7 to share resources and information on complementary areas of research and development in high performance networking.

UCSD, through the research and development activities of the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) and the Measurement and Operations Analysis Team (MOAT) of the National Laboratory for Applied Network Research (NLANR), signed a memorandum of understanding with NUS and its Internet Research and Development Unit (IRDU) to collaborate in areas where they have complementary interests, including the global caching network, network measurement and statistics, and exchange of students and staff between the universities.

NLANR's MOAT and the IRDU will collaboratively collect, analyze and visualize statistics and topology, information on a new intercontinental link between the National Science Foundation's (NSF) very high performance Backbone Network Service (vBNS) and Singapore Internet Next Generation Advanced Research and Education Network (SINGAREN).

The NSF and several other research institutions and organizations in the U.S. also signed memoranda of understanding with Singapore to foster research relationships in the areas of medicine, manufacturing, education, tele-immersion and architecture.

This is the first trans-Pacific high performance connection for the vBNS. A connection to Canada's high performance network was the first international link. SINGAREN'S physical link will be the NSF-funded Science, Technology And Research Transit Access Point (STAR TAP), which is designed to facilite the long-term interconnection and interoperability of advanced international networking.

The vBNS is a research tool for U.S. universities, managed through a cooperative agreement with MCI. It has a transmission capacity of 622 megabits (mbps) per second level (OC12) and is expected to increase to as much as a few gigabits per second by the year 2000.

NLANR is a cooperative effort among UCSD/SDSC, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, and Carnegie Mellon University.

For more information, please visit the following Web sites:
http://www.nlanr.net
http://www.vbns.net
http://www.singaren.net.sg
http://www.sdsc.edu

Contacts:
Tracie Monk
NLANR
tmonk@nlanr.net
ph: +1.619.822.0943

Stacy Ang
Singapore National Science & Technology Board
stacyang@nstb.gov.sg
ph: +011.65.770.5835