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Scientists Seek to Create Their Own Superhighway

December 8, 2003 Scientists Seek to Create Their Own Superhighway Many researchers and scientists, desperate to conduct serious research, are frustrated by the Internet’s enormous popularity and congested traffic. They have subsequently begun to plan a new superhighway solely for themselves. An $80 million fiber-optic network, the National LambdaRail system is being considered the Internet of the future by many and is hoped to revolutionize the sharing of information. Information will be measured in billions of bits per second, and beams of light will carry this information instantly across the country. In November, supercomputing centers in Chicago and Pittsburgh were the first be connected by a 674-mile section of the National LambdaRail. 10,000 miles of fiber will be added over the next year by a large group of companies and universities interested in creating the largest and fastest landmark research network in the world. The catch is that only the scientific community will have access to the National LambdaRail. However, the efforts will affect future networking projects, possibly leading to incredible advances in medicine, business, and entertainment. Atlanta and Washington should be connected by the superhighway by April of 2004. Atlanta to Dallas and Atlanta to Jacksonville sections will follow shortly afterwards. Georgia Tech, the only Atlanta member of the developing consortium, plans to make resources available to over 20 colleges throughout the state through the use of an electronic “on ramp” which they plan to manage. Scientists are creating LamdaRail because the Internet’s increased congestion and high level of security breaches compromise the serious research efforts. In addition, the Internet cannot keep pace with the high powered computers that use it or the large amounts of information that scientists seek to access. Scientists, along with consumers, are increasingly needing and wanting higher amounts of bandwidth to access these large amounts of data. The National Center for Atmospheric Research, for instance, reported this year that its total holdings - atmosphere, ocean and weather information spanning more than a century - had reached a petabyte in size, roughly 100 times the contents of the Library of Congress. By next year it will total two petabytes. National LambdaRail will change the equation. Each strand of transcontinental glass fiber will be able to carry 40 channels of information on a different wavelength, for which the scientific symbol is the Greek letter lambda. That’s 400 billion bits of data a second - the contents of a library floor of books, 250 high-definition television images or 5 million simultaneous phone conversations. Such huge computing power, like the NSF’s TeraGrid, could tackle tasks that demand trillions, or even quadrillions, of computations a second such as digital sky surveys, genome research, earthquake simulation, and climate modeling. Copyright 2002-2003 GRIDtoday. Redistribution of this article is forbidden by law without the express written consent of the publisher. For a subscription to GRIDtoday, send e-mail to gridfree @ gridtoday.com