Imagine a professor teaching hundreds of students worldwide from a desktop computer located in his or her office. Imagine two orchestras separated by hundreds of miles playing symphonies in perfect synchronization. Imagine surgeons providing live assistance to medical personnel in remote areas. This is today’s reality brought to you by Internet2, limited only by your imagination.

The University of Maryland, College Park has always been at the forefront of advanced networking and computing and, in fact, played a pioneering and leadership role in creating today’s Internet. In keeping with this tradition, the Office of Information Technology (OIT) is actively working to provide the support necessary for the University to continue its leading role in advanced research on the uses of computing technology.

Our participation in Internet2, a consortium of over 180 universities working in partnership with government and industry, will further this effort. The Internet2 consortium strives to design a more advanced and cutting-edge, yet stable, computer network infrastructure that will promote the development and support of sophisticated and revolutionary, applications, services and technology.

Members of Internet2, such as the University of Maryland, connect to a very high-speed, low-delay network backbone, named Abilene. The connections are made through a number of regional network aggregation points, known as gigapops, which serve members in a geographic area. Since the gigapops are themselves regional networks, the Internet2 is much like the original Internet in that it is not one network, but a collection of networks.

Sheer speed is one of the more visible characteristics that differentiates this network from the slow, congested and over-loaded traditional Internet. Launched in 1996, the Abilene fiber-optic backbone operates at blazing OC48 speeds (2.4 gigabits per second) and provides the advanced networking capabilities needed by the Internet2 research community. GigaPoPs connect to the Abilene backbone at minimum OC12 speeds (622 megabits per second).

The Mid-Atlantic Crossroads (MAX) is the Washington Metropolitan area gigaPoP serving the mid-Atlantic region. A multi-state consortium of four regional universities, Georgetown University, George Washington University, the University of Maryland and Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, runs MAX. MAX has one of the highest speed connections into Abilene. It is as fast as the backbone itself, connecting at the speed of OC48. The first router that connected the MAX to Abilene was located at the University of Maryland and we continue in a key role by administering and hosting this aggregation point.

In a big and complex world, where communications and partnerships are global, and where technology dependence only grows, the need for innovative and revolutionary applications is more than obvious. The ingenious minds of researchers devise new ways that exploit the high speed of massive information transfer enabled by the Internet2 network to create applications that revolutionize human processes and interaction. For example, Fujitsu Labs of America at College Park (FLA-CP) hosts the School of the Internet (SOI) whose mission is to support advanced videoconferencing between universities. On November 9, FLA-CP broadcast its first live remote lecture from its studio to a classroom at Keio University in Japan. The lecture traveled via FLA-CP’s MAX connection over Internet2’s high-speed network and demonstrated the abilities of leading edge network properties like the next generation protocol IPv6.

This protocol is designed to enable the steady and stable growth of the Internet in terms of the numbers of connected hosts. With the explosive growth of “networkable and nomadic” devices, IPv6’s increased address space of 128 bits from 32 bits allows support of more levels of addressing hierarchy and a much larger number of addressable nodes. Additionally, IPv6 supports quality of service (QoS) parameters for real-time audio and video which allows senders to tag packets for special handling. The Internet2 network acts as a test bed for features like IPv6, thereby supporting Internet2’s guiding engineering principle of developing new network capabilities while designing tomorrow’s sophisticated network.

Internet2 technology has impacted many aspects of human life including music and theater by changing live musical performances, as we know them. The new Internet2 technology, referred to as Internet2 Distributed Musical, enables the technical advances of delivering full-bandwidth high-quality video and audio to allow the sharing and synchronization of music, video and interactivity between two locations. In February 2001, Internet2 enabled the production of “The Technophobe and the Madman” staged at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) campus. The actual performance occurred in two locations 162 miles apart. One part of the performance, “The Madman”, was performed in New York City and the other, “Confessions of a Technophobe”, at RPI, the two being united electronically in near real-time through Internet2’s networking technology.

Internet2 also potentially revolutionizes the field of medicine. In the future, getting a second opinion could be an instantaneous event. Internet2’s videoconferencing and high bandwidth capabilities make the live broadcast of a doctor-patient consultation session to another remote specialist possible, thereby enabling multiple medical opinions and dialogues for a medical case in real-time. And yet another application, as broadband connections become more commonplace and affordable, remote monitoring of patients may become the order of the day in telemedicine. Furthermore, special and rare medical procedures could potentially be broadcast in real-time to students in the medical profession, thereby making their education richer and paving the way for “virtually experienced” young medical professionals.

Tightly coupled with advanced research in networks and applications is advanced research in middleware, the layer between the network and applications which provides identification, authentication, authorization and security. In today’s technology such services are provided by and built into applications leading to numerous incompatible systems and methodologies. Internet2 middleware research is looking at providing an interoperable middleware infrastructure fluidly accommodating the needs of complex policies and practices. In making middleware its own “layer”, the “burden” of middleware responsibility is taken off the shoulders of networks and applications. It is the hope that this separate and critical layer will address the crying needs of interoperability, elimination of duplicated core data sets and services, and promote the centralized provisioning of middleware services.

You don’t need to work in computer science or perform research in advanced applications to benefit from Internet2. In fact, if you connect to a computer at another Internet2 member institution or site, you are already using Internet2.The University has been connected to the Internet2 since 1998 and all Internet traffic to Internet2 members is routed via MAX over the Internet2 backbone to the member institution. Such traffic is taking advantage of the University’s high-speed Internet2 connection transparent to the end-user. This high-speed connectivity does not have any special requirements for end-users at the University, is invisible to them and expands the capabilities of Maryland research. The increased network capacity has greatly benefited research in high-end computing and in applications that have intense communications and massive dataset needs. OIT staff members are active participants in Internet2 initiatives and are available to the University research community as a resource.

During the research and building of the original Internet, the University of Maryland played a prominent role. We have made significant contributions in the areas of image processing, routing protocols and the domain name service (DNS). One of the root name servers still sits on campus. We played a significant role in SURANet, one of the first regional networks. In keeping with this tradition, the OIT is committed to providing support for the promotion of Internet2 research, development and awareness at Maryland.

The Office of Information Technology is working to spur the growth and prominence of the University in Internet2 activity. Two OIT staff members, Tripti Sinha and Dr. Mark Matties have been assigned to give technical assistance, answer questions and aid development of the University community. If you have any questions regarding Internet2, please contact them at Internet2@nts.umd.edu. OIT is also working to improve the network infrastructure on campus. Most locations have 10 megabits per second access into the campus network, while for some newer spaces it is 100 megabits per second. A project is underway that will bring 100 megabits per second network connectivity to all of campus. Finally, OIT continues to support the growth of the MAX.