Qwest Partners With Scientific Community to Launch Powerful [...]

📅 August 10, 2001 - Qwest Communications International Inc. (qwest.com 👉 Total Reviews: 1
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The four research centers are the National Center for SupercomputingApplications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; theSan Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California, SanDiego; Argonne National Laboratory in Argonne, Ill.; and the CaliforniaInstitute of Technology in Los Angeles.
These institutions were selected by the NSF to develop the DTF, which willbe the largest, most comprehensive computing infrastructure ever deployedfor scientific research. Using its industry-leading wavelength servicesnetwork, Qwest will provide the ultra high-speed broadband network tointerconnect these four research institutions, IBM will offer itsgeographically distributed Linux servers and Intel will supply itsItanium-family processors.
The DTF network will consist of four 10 gigabit/second wavelengths for atotal network capacity of 40 gigabits/second. The DTF network will be 16times faster than any research network available today - enough capacity totransfer the entire contents of the world's publicly accessible Web sitesamong any of the four DTF sites in only two hours.
"This project reinforces Qwest's commitment to the education and researchcommunity by building on our previous projects, such as our involvement inInternet2 and the Abilene network, the NASA Research and Education Network,and the Energy Sciences Network, as well as the Global Grid Forum, whichenvisions a platform for worldwide shared computing resources," said Dr.Wesley Kaplow, chief technology officer of Qwest Government SystemsDivision.
The NSF is a leading indicator of future bandwidth demand, and the launch ofthis network provides the latest and largest step in bandwidth demand, notunlike the NSFnet, which was the original core of the Internet. Thepharmaceutical, automotive, biotechnology and petroleum industries, as wellas others, will be able to witness the power of these high-speed network andcomputer systems, fueling the demand for network bandwidth to connect theirU.S. and worldwide supercomputing systems.
"With this network, the nation's most advanced computers, instruments anddata archives will be interconnected with greater capacity than we now haveat the largest computer centers. Yet, the resources are in four locations,2,000 miles apart," said Dan Reed, director of NCSA and the NationalComputational Science Alliance on behalf of the four DTF researchinstitutions. "We effectively are improving on the Internet's elimination ofdistance and time barriers by making shared access to massive data -whether it's output from a radio telescope or scientific computersimulations - a routine endeavor."
NSF will provide $53 million to the four DTF institutions in the 2002 fiscalyear. DTF will be a distributed facility that will provide scientists withan unprecedented capacity for computing, data analysis and management, high-resolution visualization, and long-distance collaboration. The DTF programand the DTF network will further the mission of NSF's Partnerships forAdvanced Computational Infrastructure (PACI) program, which is creating anationwide computational and information infrastructure to enablebreakthrough discoveries in science and engineering.
The PACI program includes two partnerships, the Alliance, led by NCSA, andthe National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (NPACI),led by SDSC. The DTF network will connect West Coast laboratories at SDSCin San Diego and Caltech in Los Angeles with Illinois laboratories at NCSAin Champaign- Urbana and Argonne in the Chicago area.
The network also will provide links to Internet2's Abilene research networkand to research networks worldwide via the Star Light interconnect inChicago. The DTF network technical deployment and operations team includesparticipants from all four DTF sites and Qwest, as well as Internet2 andStar Light. The DTF network will use Qwest facilities operating among SanDiego, Los Angeles and Chicago.