Washington, D.C. -- Vice President Al Gore announced that the National
Science Foundation is awarding $12.3 million in grants to 35 research
institutions across the United States to allow them to connect to the very
high speed Backbone Network Service (vBNS). These grants will bring the total
number of research institutions connected to vBNS to 64.

  "Today's announcement is part of a strategy that will allow researchers  to
push forward the frontiers of science in ways that we can only dream about,"
said the Vice President. "Scientists will be able to use remote
supercomputers, collaborate effectively with other scientists around the
country, and easily access huge quantities of data. This will lead to
advances in our ability to predict the weather, find cures for genetic
diseases, and accurately model the health of our environment."

  The NSF grants help set the foundation for the administration's Next
Generation Internet (NGI) initiative (See HPCwire article 10915, "NGI
BRIEFING AT SDSC FOCUSES ON ISSUES NOT ANSWERS", 03.21.97.), a $100 million-
per-year, 3-year project that will:

   -- connect more than 100 research institutions at speeds that are 100-1,
000 times faster than today's Internet;

   -- invest in research and development for new networking technologies,
such as the ability to handle real-time, multimedia traffic; and

   -- demonstrate new applications in areas such as distance education,
telemedicine, national security, and "collaboratories" (laboratories  without
walls).

   Private sector companies will commercialize the new technologies that are
developed as part of the NGI initiative -- generating economic  growth, new
jobs, and new services for the tens of millions of Internet users.

   "Previous government investments in research networks, such as the ARPANET
and the NSFNET, have produced huge payoffs for our economy and our society,"
said the Vice President. "The Internet boom has generated $200 billion in
economic value for new and existing firms, and hundreds of thousands of
high-wage jobs. It is also allowing us to connect all of our children to the
same universe of knowledge. The Next Generation Internet initiative is a
critical investment in our future -- and will serve as a catalyst for the new
networks and networked applications of the 21st century."

  The NGI initiative is a partnership between industry, academia, and
government agencies (the National Science Foundation, the Department of
Defense, the Department of Energy, NASA, the National Library of  Medicine,
and the National Institute of Standards and Technology). It  has been
endorsed by industry leaders at companies such as MCI, Sun, Silicon Graphics,
Cisco, General Electric, Teledesic, Novell, Ipsilon, Lucent Technologies, and
Fore Systems.

  21 two-year grants, made both to individual institutions and to consortiums
of research universities, range from approximately $350,000 to $3.8 million,
depending on the number of institutions involved. The total for all 21 grants
is $12.3 million. MCI Communications Corp., with headquarters in Washington,
D.C., provides the vBNS under the terms of a cooperative agreement with NSF.

  The vBNS can transmit as many as 622 million bits per second and will
eventually will be capable of transmitting 2.4 billion bits per second.

  "We are now more than half of the way to our goal of connecting the top 100
research institutions," said Mark Luker, who directs the NSFNET program.
NSFNET was the test-bed and the original backbone of the existing Internet,
until it was decommissioned in 1995.

  "With vBNS, NSF is continuing the tradition we began with the NSFNET
backbone of pushing networking to the limits in support of the academic
research community, while enabling the transfer of cutting-edge technology to
the commercial realm," Luker said.

  In a closely related development, "Internet 2," a consortium of
universities committed to the development of advanced networking to support
future educational applications of telecommunications and technology, has
designated the vBNS its primary telecommunications network.

  More information about the NGI is available at http://www.ngi.gov

  A press release from the NSF noted that the 35 institutions that have been
awarded the most recent vBNS grants will use the high-speed connection and
the network's ability to handle vast amounts of data to tackle a variety of
problems that would be difficult to manipulate in any other way.

  Some of the uses to which the vBNS links will be put include the following:

  -- Creating three-dimensional simulations: Tracking and understanding the
various factors that contribute to the health of an ecosystem is an extremely
difficult task. One way that researchers can understand the interaction of
these many variables is through computer simulation.

  Virginia's Old Dominion University, in partnership with the University of
Wisconsin-Madison and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications,
will use its vBNS connection to create, display and share with other
institutions a high-quality digital simulation of the underwater world of the
Chesapeake Bay, one of the nation's largest estuaries. The health of the
Chesapeake, though improved in recent years, has suffered for decades from
the effects of a combination of natural disasters and natural and artificial
stresses and pollutants.

  The high-capacity transmission capabilities of the vBNS will allow
oceanographers at one institution to run the simulation on a remote
supercomputer for the benefit of colleagues at as many as five other
institutions. The vBNS will allow the display of three-dimensional images in
a specially equipped room and allow the researcher to study a wide variety of
scenarios by navigating through the simulated estuary.

  -- Studying weather patterns: The constant fluctuation of the many factors
in weather patterns makes studying them a computational challenge.

  The University of Utah, in partnership with the National Center for
Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Colorado, the Desert Research Institute in
Nevada, and the University of Arizona, will use its vBNS connection to
develop and share complex meteorological models.

  By joining together in a single network a variety of geographically
dispersed computers, the project would create the Distributed Numerical
Weather Prediction Laboratory. The laboratory would be used for experiments
and demonstrations, including weather-pattern simulations and real-time
weather forecasting. The laboratory also could be used for instruction and
training, particularly for graduate students.

  -- Sharing environmental data: Through the Unidata program, more than 140
institutions nationwide share a variety of environmental information,
gathered by satellites, radar, supercomputer forecast models, and other
means, to improve research and enhance education through the Internet Data
Distribution System (IDD).

  Unidata currently transmits huge computer files of up to 20 gigabytes of
information daily to computers at member scientists' home institutions. But
the transmission capacity of the existing Internet limits the amount and
quality of the data that can be easily shared, thereby handicapping the
program's research and education agenda.

  Using its vBNS connection, Unidata will be able to send more and
higher-quality data to its member sites; make the connection to remotely
stored data more "transparent," allowing researchers to access distant
information as if it were stored on local machines; and extend the use of the
IDD beyond the atmospheric, oceanographic and hydrological researchers who
are currently the system's primary users to researchers in other disciplines.

INSTITUTIONS RECEIVING vBNS GRANTS

  The following list of institutions received the latest round of
high-performance connection grants. For more information about specific
grants, please contact the public affairs office at the individual
institutions.

Dartmouth College

Georgia State University

Harvard University

Indiana University at Bloomington Johns Hopkins University

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

   MCNC ( includes Duke University; North Carolina State
   University; University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; and the
   North Carolina Supercomputing Center)

Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey

Texas A&M University (also includes the Institute for Biosciences
   and Technology at Houston)

The Regents of the University of California, for the Consortium
   for Education Network Initiatives in California (CENIC).
   Includes University of California campuses at Berkeley, Davis,
   Irvine, Riverside, San Francisco, Santa Barbara and Santa
   Cruz; and the following private institutions: Stanford
   University, California Institute of Technology, the University
   of Southern California (USC) and USC's Information Sciences
   Institute.

University of Arizona

University of Kentucky

University of Maryland, Baltimore County University of New Mexico

University of Notre Dame University of Tennessee, Knoxville

University of Texas at Austin University of Utah

University of Wisconsin - Madison Vanderbilt University