It's been only a year and half since MIRnet, an advanced, next-generation network linking the U.S. and Russian scientific communities, began providing service. In that short time, the network has supported hundreds of partnerships between Russian and U.S. institutions, enabled collaborative teaching sessions, and made possible live online seminars between scientists at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, TN, and Moscow's Kurchatov Institute.

"From September 1999 to September 2000 we have seen a huge growth in the use of the network," said Greg Cole, of the University of Tennessee and one of the principal investigators with the U.S.-Russian MIRnet program. "The benefits have been many, from richer communications among international colleagues to a new mindset that can spur development of a high-performance networking infrastructure in Russia."

MIRnet is funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation to the University of Tennessee and by the Russian Ministry of Science and Technology. MIRnet currently provides a 6 MB/s connection over ATM service, divided into three channels for general traffic, reserved applications and multicast traffic. The link connects the two countries from the NSF-funded STAR TAP facility in Chicago to the M9 facility in Moscow using a trans-Atlantic fiber optic channel from Teleglobe, Inc. CIVnet is supported by the Ford Foundation and the Eurasia Foundation and seeks to improve local connectivity in Russia and use the Internet to foster a sense of community and build better communications among local governments, healthcare organizations, schools, and citizens.

"CIVnet is managed locally by F&P's Natasha Bulashova and accountability is local," said Cole. "The result is that hundreds of local organizations and individuals in six Russian cities have been able to get online. The network plays an important role in community building and it can be a force in local economic development."

Thanks to the MIRnet and CIVnet efforts, Russian scientists and educators now have access to information from a wide range of institutions, including the NSF-funded National Laboratory for Applied Network Research (NLANR) (the heaviest single project source of traffic from the U.S. to Russia), the University of Illinois, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Additional U.S. organizations who use MIRnet heavily are the Department of Energy and NASA, said Cole.

Plans are now underway to expand MIRnet's capacity from 6 MB/s to 45 MB/s, and to expand MIRnet connections beyond the population center around Moscow. With higher bandwidth and more connections, MIRnet should be able to expand its user base beyond university researchers to government agencies and the corporate research and development community. In addition MIRnet is implementing a reservation system that will allow scheduling of network resources and thereby assure a reasonable quality of service. For CIVnet, future plans include expanding beyond Russia into central Asia and the Ukraine.

For more information:
see http://www.friends.partners.org/friends/mirnet/ (in the U.S.) or http://www.friends.partners.ru/friends/mirnet/ (in Russia).