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NCSA Takes Active Role in Internet2 Development

Source: HPCWire, April 10, 1998

Champaign, IL -- As NCSA's Access Magazine reported, The National Computational Science Alliance (Alliance) and its leading-edge site, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is playing a significant role in planning and developing policies and applications for the Internet of the twenty-first century.

This week, Alliance Executive Committee member Tom DeFanti was named head of the Applications Strategy Council advisory committee for the University Corporation for Advanced Internet Development (UCAID). The committee will advise on conceptualization, functionality, technical design, and development priorities of advanced network applications. UCAID members are developing broadband applications, engineering and network management tools for research and education as part of the Internet2 project. Internet2 is a collaborative effort by more than 120 U.S. research universities, working with partners in government and industry. DeFanti is also associate director of NCSA's national technology Grid development division and director of the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Charlie Catlett, NCSA's senior associate director for science and technology, helped establish the National Laboratory for Applied Network Research (NLANR) in 1995 with Hans-Werner Braun of the University of California, San Diego. He now heads the NLANR Applications and User Services section as head of the NLANR Distributed Applications Support Team (DAST).

NLANR is a collaboration among NSF-supported supercomputer sites that provides technical, engineering and traffic analysis support of NSF high performance connections sites and the broader vBNS user community. In January, NSF awarded $2 million over 30 months to NCSA to create the DAST team. The team will help users of the vBNS maximize performance of the applications and solve network programs.

"We will be helping to guarantee that users of the vBNS have the tools they need to conduct research," said Catlett. "In the long run, these are the applications that will benefit all of science."

Larry Smarr, director of the Alliance and NCSA, was appointed to the Presidential Advisory Committee on High-Performance Computing and Communications, Information Technology, and the Next Generation Internet in February, 1997. Ken Kennedy, a member of the Alliance Executive Committee and director of the Center for Research on Parallel Computation (CRPC) at Rice University, is cochair of the committee.

The committee provides guidance to the administration's efforts to accelerate development and adoption of information technologies that will be vital to the twenty-first century. Currently, the committee is working on an interim report that will advise the President on issues that impact investments in high-end computing, information technology, and networking.