California Colleges Building Own Net
Calif. colleges building own Net - May 24, 1997
A group of universities in California are building their own information highway to exchange data from
libraries and laboratories at least 100 times faster than the Internet.
The project, announced yesterday, will form a sort of virtual university in which students can read books
from
distant libraries and take classes at other campuses. Along with expanding such resources, the new network
could help schools save money by avoiding the duplication of resources.
They said the network, which will be up and running next year, will also be more reliable than today's
Internet.
"The electronic highway is faced with rush-hour traffic most of the day. We need reliable service
delivery," said M. Stuart Lynn, University of California associate vice president and the principal
investigator for the project.
The network will be designed to connect campuses at speeds of over 600 million bits per second. At that
rate,
a 30-volume encyclopedia could be transmitted in less than one second.
Participating schools include seven campuses of the University of California, along with the
California Institute of Technology, the California State University, Stanford University, and the
University
of Southern California.
The schools are members of the Consortium for Education Network Initiatives in California, which earlier
this
week won a $3.8 million grant for the project from the National Science Foundation.
In addition to the statewide effort, major universities in California are also participating in a similar
project to link more than 100 research universities across the country, an initiative known as
Internet 2. They said they decided to separately link schools within California to ensure the
state
has the best technology to support its research and educational needs.
The network will also give more students virtual access to state-of-the art research tools, such as a
sophisticated electron microscope at the UC's Riverside campus or an advanced telescope in Hawaii that
some California schools help manage. Medical researchers will be able to transmit images over the network
for
diagnosis and teaching purposes.
"Some of these schools are already sharing research journals, and we expect to do more of that in the
future," Lynn said. "The cost of many of these journals is rising exponentially, and there is a
strong incentive to make sure we are not duplicating our resources unnecessarily."
Asked whether this digital information-sharing would do away with the schools' need to maintain their
own
resources, Lynn replied: "When's the future? Is it 100 years from now, 1,000, or two years?"
"I think there will be a lot of water under the bridge before schools do away with their print
libraries."
:: About placing and receiving Internet2 video calls via your CENIC connection ::
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- Alan Phillips, Imperial COE
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