Spring 2001
What is Internet2?
Where is Mississippi in I2?
How far along is I2?
What cool applications are
possible with I2?
When should UM to connect to I2?
Internet2 is the private network that is being constructed as a super-fast delivery medium for advanced academic and research networking applications. I2 development is overseen by UCAID, a consortium of government agencies, research affiliates, corporations, and over 185 member academic institutions, like Ole Miss, whose network engineers and applications programmers are building and testing the infrastructure from the bottom up. Each member institution must ante up with $25,000 annually, and is expected to contribute its networking expertise to the pioneering effort, which is coordinated at and between the semi-annual events such as the Spring 2001 Intenet2 Member Meeting that was held March 7-9, in Washington, D.C. Moreover, to stay in the game, a university must demonstrate committed intent to connect its campus to the Internet2 backbone via a local aggregation point (known as a “gigaPoP”). This connectivity investment is substantial, over $600,000 per year at present market rate.
Cost not withstanding, 160+ universities (over 90% of member institutions) have already established their connections to Internet2, and are beginning to receive research grants to tap its potential. By contrast, only 3 of Mississippi’s 4 member institutions are plugged-in players (MSU, JSU, & USM), while the fourth member, Ole Miss is one of only a handful of member institutions in the nation that is still playing catch-up, trying to find funds to match challenge grants from NSF and EPSCoR to get connected. Even as Ole Miss tries to stage a rally, this summer over a thousand K-12 institutions in ten states are expected to establish an Internet2 presence by piggy-backing on their regional connected Universities, providing a vast consumer base and impetus for innovative educational applications. http://www.internet2.edu/html/universities.html
With the overwhelming majority of member institutions now connected to the I2 backbone, development attention is shifting from connecting lines and transmitting packets, to lubricating the network for easy and speedy use. The idea is to assemble open, vendor-independent components into layers of interoperable advanced networking services, in a manner that could never be possible on the commodity internet, given the nature of corporate competition. These services will grease the network with open-standard, ready-to-use, research and education-oriented distribution architectures. Researchers, educators, and software specialists will be free to develop the kinds of slick applications that are possible when energy can be focused on creating innovative content. Meanwhile, federal agencies will continue to propel the middleware development effort by awarding millions in annual grants, not only to middleware developers, but also to the researchers, educators, and programmers whose application development efforts provide a laboratory and propel progress.
What is the nature of the Internet2 applications of today and tomorrow? By definition, an Internet2 application must have a research or education focus, must be distributed in nature, and must not be possible or practical using the commercial internet, whether due to performance constraints, or the lack of prerequisite and sufficiently abstract, high-level networking services. By nature, such applications have thus far involved geographically dispersed collaboration, distributed, visualization-enabled learning, and/or remote information sharing. Virtual laboratories, digital libraries, Tele-Immersion, and distributed instruction, are among the current areas of focus. What specific kinds of I2 applications could there be? Too many to imagine, but the following hypothetical applications are composite sketches of the possible, based on applications already funded elsewhere.
An Ole Miss undergraduate astronomy student is logging in to the Iowa Robotics Telescopes website, using his Ole Miss account id and password, just minutes after the two Universities’ physics departments agree to an information sharing collaboration. The Iowa site instantly grants the necessary access, and soon the student is using his web browser to point the giant telescope to the Horsehead Nebula of Orion.
A Ph.D. student in molecular biology at the Medical College of Ohio is logging in from his Toledo dorm room to a web site at the UM Medical Center in Jackson, using his Ohio id and password, and is instantly recognized and given access to the Mississippi’s only LEO 912AB transmission electron microscope, which he then uses to examine an unstained, frozen, hydrated protein.
Spectators at UM’s new Gertrude Castellow Ford Center for the Performing Arts, and at MSU’s Lee Hall auditorium, are enjoying the first, live, distributed musical performance, an antiphonal concert by the University of Mississippi Gospel Choir and the Mississippi State Black Voices Gospel Choir. (Or perhaps you would prefer a performance of “Porgy and Bess,” featuring the UM Theatre Department and the USM Jazz Band, with special guest Ellis Marsalis, live from Fulton Chapel and USM’s Martha R. Tatum Theatre.) Beginning the next day, the performance will be viewable on-demand, in television-like, stereo quality, by hundreds of thousands of students at I2 connected colleges and K-12 schools across the country.
A US Army Major is interacting with an individualized, multi-media educational presentation, being delivered real-time to his notebook computer, as part of an online Masters degree in Curriculum and Instruction he is earning from Ole Miss. (He is due to retire in a year, and plans to move to Mississippi to teach high school as a second career.)
Have your own idea for a killer I2 app? If you are a student, faculty member, or researcher at UM, or another Mississippi institution of higher learning, email us your idea or research abstract, and we'll use it to fuel I2 momentum.
If Ole Miss has been waiting for a better time to come onboard Internet2, perhaps that time has come. As education takes the center stage of our national debate, the research frontier is still vast and mostly pristine, with the best ideas having only just begun to emerge. Researchers at Internet2 institutions are being lured into the this wilderness with millions of annual I2 grants from such federal agencies as NSF, NASA, the Department of Energy, the National Library of Medicine, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. These other member universities have toiled to hammer down the infrastructure that now lies invitingly before us—our high-speed access to the national field of knowledge.
In 19th Century America, when our forefathers were conquering the frontier, Horace Greeley urged: “Go West, young man, and grow up with the country.” Taking to the trail was not to be guaranteed that free acres would bear crops, or that pie pans would yield gold, but many did, and the migration was a natural and vital progression of the American spirit. If you drive out West today, you will see many bumper stickers advising: “free the foot, and the mind will follow.” This is the mantra of cross country skiers, and a metaphor that might serve us as well, for once we free the web, geography need no longer be a major obstacle to knowledge discovery; rather, our collective imagination will be the limit. As decades pass, new frontiers emerge. In recent years, the University’s leaders have not been content to guard our place of prominence within Mississippi’s borders; rather, they have been quick marching us forward, making great and farsighted strides, polishing our image, and bringing us to an increasingly positive position of national attention. If we find a way to step up as boldly to our current opportunity, we will remain well-positioned to attract and retain such forward-thinking educational leaders and researchers, to execute our goal of expanding the frontiers of knowledge, and to more decisively stake our claim as a great public research university.
Jason
Hale
April 24, 2001