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DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION
FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY / OCTOBER 6, 2003: VOL. 2 NO. 40
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Breaking News -
Networking:
PSC To Help Bring High-Speed
Networking Home
The National Science Foundation has awarded $7.5 million to the Pittsburgh
Supercomputing Center and seven other institutions to bring high-speed
Internet connections to American homes. The award, through NSF's Information
Technology Research program, was announced Sept. 17.
PSC will contribute networking experts and infrastructure to help develop
a testbed for a future, high-speed Internet.
The project, tentatively dubbed "100 x 100," will wire households with 100
megabit per second Internet connections -- about 100 times faster than
currently available broadband connections -- with the ultimate goal of
upgrading 100 million households within the next few years. Together with
Carnegie Mellon University, Fraser Research, Rice University, the University
of California at Berkeley, Stanford University, Internet2 and ATT Research,
PSC will help design and implement testbed networks in Pittsburgh, Pa.,
Houston, Texas and Princeton, NJ and a national network to link the
testbeds.
"The Internet wasn't designed with high-speed, home access in mind," said
PSC
network engineer Matt Mathis, who will help design the architecture of the new
networks. "For 100 Mb per second to every home to work, we have to rethink the
fundamental design of the network." Mathis, an expert on network tuning, will
work on network protocols to ensure that advanced applications, such as video
on demand, meet the expectations of high-speed, home users.
PSC will also contribute resources at the Pittsburgh GigaPoP to the effort.
The GigaPoP -- a high-speed network crossroads -- manages fiber-optic cable
connections to Internet backbones and Abilene, an exclusive, high-speed
research network. These high-bandwidth connections will provide access to
resources such as digital libraries and the Visible Human database --
resources that require high-speed connections and that will demonstrate the
potential of 100 Mb per second to the home.
The Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center is a joint effort of Carnegie Mellon
University and the University of Pittsburgh together with the Westinghouse
Electric Company. It was established in 1986 and is supported by several
federal agencies, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and private industry.
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