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The Next Generation Internet: NSF Announces Awards for New High Performance Connections

Today the National Science Foundation recommended the first set of 13 awards for innovative high performance connections.

As more and more increasingly sophisticated tools are developed for the Internet, the demand for high performance connections grows, especially within the research and education community. In March, the National Science Foundation introduced a new twist to its connections program to help solve the problem: emphasizing innovative solutions that may eventually have broad implications for the next generation of the Internet. Funding has now been recommended for the first set of 13. About 35 more applications will be considered in the second round.

"There is no single ideal solution -- as evidenced by the fact that we have already received so many strong, fundable proposals," said Mark Luker, who manages the program for NSF. "We've asked researchers to come to us with a demonstrated need for high performance networking and a willingness to work toward innovative solutions with their campus network providers -- and clearly there is a great interest in the community."

New applications include distributed computing, remote access to instruments, visualization of weather, chemical reactions, medicine, multimedia collaboration and others, all of which depend on the advanced capabilities of the vBNS, NSF's high performance backbone network.

These connections are expected to form the core of a new community for advanced applications of networking that will speed the pace of research and development in the U.S.

The following are examples of the types of awards, with contact information:

• Tom DeFanti, Univ. of Illinois, Chicago; [email protected]; (312) 996-3002
  Award: $350K
  Meritorious applications include: data intensive computing; digital libraries; visualization and steering of computation; and 3-D collaboration
  Collaborating with: Northwestern University; University of Chicago; and Carnegie Mellon University
  
  
• Oliver McBryan, University of Colorado-Boulder; [email protected]; (303) 665-0544 and (303) 492-3898
  Award: $287K
  Meritorious applications include: Grand Challenge Application Group (GCAC) - Coupled Fields and GAFD Turbulence; HBNG users (meritorious access HPCC groups)
  Collaborating with: NCAR (National Center for Atmospheric Research) and Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center
  
  
• Earving Blythe, Virginia Tech; [email protected]; (540) 231-4227
  Award: $350K
  Meritorious applications include: high performance remote computing; interactive multi media; digital libraries; mathematics; high-speed civil transportation
  Collaborating with: Virginia Broadband Education Network (VBEN)
  
  
• Paul Woodward, Univ. of Minnesota; [email protected]; (612) 626-0044
  Award: $350K
  Meritorious applications include: distributed parallel storage and computing; visual Supercomputing; collaborative scientific visualization