Publication Date: April 11, 1997

Networking Comes To Define Realm of Research

By Sue Mellen

More than 20 years ago, before there were commercial Web sites, corporate intranets and extranets, the academic world was experimenting with networking technology. Using--and in some cases, developing--the precursors to today's Internet, once-isolated academicians found that network-based communication allowed them to share ideas and enlist colleagues' help in working through research problems. Today, thanks to the growth and maturation of the technology, worldwide collaboration virtually defines much academic research.

"The great thing about the Internet is that scholars can now communicate with the other people in the world who really care about what they're doing. And now they can do it on a daily basis, not just twice a year at specialized academic conferences," says Hope Tillman, director of libraries at Babson College in Wellesley, Mass.

Using a variety of mechanisms including electronic mail, listservers and newsgroups, academicians in disciplines as diverse as medieval history and magnetic fusion access research data and share information.

As a means of further enhancing academic research, ultra-powerful parallel computing systems at academic centers like Boston University are soon to be linked together in a network offering researchers the computational muscle they need to solve some of the world's thorniest problems. And, just over the horizon, is the Internet 2 Project (also referred to as the Next Generation Internet), an effort to build a new high-performance Internet. The stereotypical academic researcher, holed up for weeks in the dusty stacks of the library in search of some elusive piece of information, is truly a vision from the past.

Unlimited Research Potential

Babson's Tillman, who has been an academic librarian for the past 20 years, says the Internet has effectively created a worldwide library without walls, a particularly important construct for scholars in highly specialized fields.

"In traditional libraries, we have to pick and choose the materials we can offer because of the limitations of our walls. There are no such limitations on the Internet, so there's a tremendous increase in the range of materials available to researchers," she says.

And, in just five years, still more research material will be available for Web publication. The Berne Convention, an international agreement regarding copyright and intellectual property issues, dictates that many copyrighted publications will enter the public domain in 2002. This should save researchers countless hours spent locating and poring over original documents, Tillman notes.

Furthermore, such traditionally conservative realms as scholarly publishing and grant-making have entered the Cyber Age, says Howard Kaplan, director of educational technology at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. Several academic journals are available in full-text, digital format. And influential grant-making agencies such as the National Science Foundation are now publishing guidelines and accepting submissions online.

"I can envision a day when the entire grant-making process--from submission to approval--will routinely take place online," Kaplan says.

Adding Muscle to Academic Research

In the next few years, a network of supercomputers promises to lift academic research to a new level, according to Roscoe Giles, co-director of Boston University's MARINER (Metacenter Affiliated Resource in the New England Region) Project at the BU Center for Computational Science. Giles is one of a select group of computer scientists working under the auspices of the National Science Foundation to establish a national network of university-based supercomputer centers. That effort took a leap forward with the NSF's recent announcement that it will fund two meta-computing programs, the National Computational Science Alliance and the National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure. According to Giles, who will co-direct educational outreach activities for both programs, the network that will grow out of the programs will provide almost unimaginable computing muscle.

"At a powerful supercomputer center like BU's, we can provide computing capacity at 100 billion floating point operations per second. We hope to create a national network with a capacity for one trillion operations per second," Giles says. Researchers worldwide will apply that enormous power to complex science and engineering problems.

The Internet 2 project recently got a boost of its own with the establishment of a White House Advisory Committee on Computing and Communications, Information Technology, and the Next Generation Internet. One of the stated goals of the group--comprised of industry and academic leaders--is the creation of a new, high-performance, high-bandwidth Internet away from the beaten path of the public Internet.

As both the Internet 2 and meta-computing projects prove, Internet technology is now as indispensable to academic research as are fast food and strong coffee.

Sue Mellen writes from Tyngsboro, Mass.

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DCI's Internet Expo covers a wide range of Internet, Web and e-mail topics. Please see our online brochure for the latest show and registration information.

For more on this topic, please see the Internet 2 home page at http://www.internet2.edu and the MARINER Project home page.

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