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UW is helping pioneer the Internet of the future

Tuesday, March 16, 1999

By RUTH SCHUBERT Mail Author
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

A University of Washington astronomer peers at the heavens through a computer screen linked to a telescope hundreds of miles away.

Computer engineers in Seattle and Pittsburgh discuss a knotty research problem via a video wall that makes it look like they're standing in adjoining rooms.

A doctor in Alaska sits in as UW physicians in Seattle discuss new treatments for diseases of the brain.

All these scenarios are possible via the Internet -- not the one that millions of AOL customers use for e-mail and surfing the Net, but the high-speed, research-only network known as Internet 2.

The Internet 2 project was created by a consortium of research universities to explore the potential of fiber-optic networks, which are capable of sending data and audio-visual files at speeds up to 1,000 times faster than the Internet we know today.

The UW was one of four universities to establish a hub on the first Internet 2 prototype, known as the Abilene network. Named after the railroad hub in Kansas that carried Texas cattle to Eastern markets, Abilene is the first iteration of Internet 2. With it, the UW is taking a lead in exploring the potential of the network.

When the Abilene network was officially launched in Washington, D.C., last month, members of the UW's computing team were on hand to demonstrate how better-than-TV-quality video can be transmitted in real time.

Not bad for a university that less than two years ago was 800 miles from the nearest planned connection point in San Francisco. It was only after heavy lobbying from the UW, Microsoft and senators from Oregon to Alaska that Seattle got on the Internet 2

map.

With a $3 million infusion of cash from the state Legislature, the UW has managed to build a GigaPoP, the term for the physical hub on Internet 2 that other institutions can hook into.

On Feb. 24, 37 universities were connected to the Abilene network. More than 60 are expected to connect by the end of the year.

The Abilene project is a collaboration of the University Corporation for Advanced Internet Development, Qwest Communications, Nortel and Cisco Systems.

The next step, UW officials say, is to build the physical lines from Seattle's Internet 2 hub to the buildings that house the university's science departments. The Seattle hub also is the physical connection point for other universities and corporate research centers.

By summer, the UW hopes to connect Washington State University, the University of Idaho, Microsoft, Pacific Northwest National Labs and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to the Seattle hub.

To pay for those connections, the UW has asked the Legislature for $3.53 million over two years to build out from Seattle, and $3.95 million to staff the GigaPoP.

So far, Gov. Gary Locke, the House and the Senate have indicated that the first $3.5 million will be added to the 1999 supplemental budget, which provides additional state money until July 1, the end of this fiscal year. Locke also has recommended appropriating the money requested for staffing.

The UW plans to focus its Internet 2 efforts on technologies likely to pay off handsomely in research grants and products that can be rolled into commercial ventures.

The areas the university has identified as having high potential include the underlying network technologies that will run the next generations of Internets, multimedia and high-quality on-demand video, and advanced medical applications.

The UW's first project -- already launched -- has been the creation of ResearchTV, which provides anyone hooked up to Internet 2 with cutting-edge research video presentations comparable in quality to cable TV

and available on demand over the Internet.

"Until now, audio and video on the Internet has been kind of like a parlor trick that doesn't really work," said Ron Johnson, vice president for computing and communications at the UW.

The ResearchTV site on Internet 2 already includes a UW Neurosurgery Conference that describes recent discoveries in the treatment of strokes; the story of how two Stanford University students created Yahoo!, the most popular search engine on the World Wide Web, and Rice University's Nobel Prize-winning chemist explaining nanoscience research and its use in everyday product development.

Researchers in several UW departments have plans ready to go for when GigaPoP is linked to their buildings.

The UW Medical Center has proposed using Internet 2 to distribute patient information -- including videos, MRI's and graphs -- among specialists at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Children's Hospital and Medical Center, and the UW Medical Center. Physicians then will be able to collaborate on diagnoses, treatments and patient management through cyberspace.

"This gives us a lot of new capabilities we didn't have before," said Brent Stewart, a radiology professor and director of imaging informatics at the UW. "As medicine gets squeezed into more cost-consciousness, we'll probably have a fewer number of physicians trying to cover a larger number of patients. I think this will be one way to help facilitate patient care."

The Computer Science and Engineering Department plans to build an interactive video wall connected to researchers at Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

At a more fundamental level, computer science and other departments would be involved in actually designing the hardware and software to make all of these whiz-bang ideas work.

"Today's network and its protocols were designed in the 1970s and 1980s with none of this in mind," said Ed Lazowska, chairman of the Computer Science and Engineering Department. "What Internet 2 is really all about is figuring out how to do this next generation of stuff."

In astronomy, Internet 2's capabilities will ease past problems in digitally transmitting enormous data files to supercomputers to create simulations of huge events in space, such as how asteroid-sized objects form into

planets.

"We first started trying to move files that were a couple of gigabytes in size about four years ago, and it was a nightmare," said George Lake, a professor of astronomy at the UW and a NASA project scientist for high-performance computing.

With the old Internet, Lake said, the transfer of data was excruciatingly slow, and often the line would disconnect before all the information was sent.

The UW also is working on hooking up the research telescope it uses in Apache Point, N.M., to the Abilene network. UW scientists then would be able to control the telescope from Seattle, obtaining instantaneous images and data through remote observing.

"Think about what life would be like in Seattle if Sea-Tac (Airport) went away," Lake said. "That's what the issue is like with us for having a piece of Internet 2. . . . If we didn't have that thing, it would be like living here with nothing but the Bellingham airport."

P-I reporter Ruth Schubert can be reached at ruthschubert@seattle

pi.com or 206-448-8130.

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