Technologies for the 21st Century Large Scale Networking

	Goals and focus areas The NGI Initiative Today's advanced federal networks Global Grid Active Networks Biomedical research Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) National center for Biotechnology Information Crisis management
Goals and focus areas	LSN R&D will help assure U.S. technological leadership in high performance network communications through research that advances the leading edge of networking technologies, services, and performance. Key research areas include advanced network components and technologies for engineering and management of large scale networks. Areas of particular focus include: Technologies and services that enable advances in wireless, optical, mobile, and wireline network communications Networking software that enables information to be disseminated to individuals, multicast to select groups, or broadcast to an entire network Software for efficient development and execution of scalable distributed applications Software components for distributed applications, such as electronic commerce, digital libraries, and health care Research infrastructure support and testbeds Advancing this agenda will lead to new and more capable networking technologies to support Federal agency missions. The Next Generation Internet (NGI) initiative will be the dominant focus of LSN R&D beginning in FY 1998. Some effects are already evident as agencies shift their focus to better accomplish the initiative's goals. This chapter highlights FY 1997 R&D accomplishments and FY 1998 R&D plans.
The NGI Initiative:	Announced by President Clinton and Vice President Gore on October 10, 1996, the NGI initiative will create a foundation for the more powerful and versatile networks of the 21st century. Based upon strong research and development programs across Federal agencies, NGI will foster partnerships among academia, industry, and Government that will keep the U.S. at the cutting-edge of information and communications technologies, and will accelerate the introduction of new networking services for our businesses, schools, and homes.   Today's Internet is the outgrowth of decades of Government investment in research networks such as the Defense Department's (DOD) ARPANET, DOE's ESnet, NASA's Science Internet, and NSF's NSFNET and NSF-initiated regional networks. The relatively small amount of Federal seed money invested in these evolutionary multi-agency programs stimulated much greater investment by industry and academia and helped create a large and rapidly growing market, resulting in one of the most spectacularly successful public-private technical collaborations in history. NGI is the next, but undoubtedly not the last, logical step in the cycle of evolving networking technologies and infrastructure needed to support U.S. research and industry.   The NGI initiative, other Federal agency information technology and R&D programs, as well as R&D programs from academia and industry, will combine to create a foundation for the networks needed in the next century. Building on these networks, universities, Federal research institutions, and industry will conduct research and develop the advanced services, protocols, and functionality necessary to support next generation applications. These activities will create an open technology transfer environment, continuing a strategy that determined much of the success of the original Internet.   To achieve this vision, the NGI initiative has established the following three goals:   Experimental research for advanced network technologies. NGI activities will develop and demonstrate the advanced network services technologies required to support next generation applications. The main areas of network services and protocols that will be developed and demonstrated include security, robustness, Quality of Service (QoS), improved network management including the allocation and sharing of bandwidth, and enhanced collaborative and distributed application environments. The challenge is to ensure that NGI capabilities can be made predictably and reliably accessible to a broad spectrum of users sharing a common infrastructure.   Next Generation Internet testbed. The Federal organizations participating in the NGI initiative will build a prototype high-performance network testbed for system-scale testing of advanced services and technologies and for developing and testing advanced applications. The testbed will emphasize improved end-to-end network performance, connect at least 100 NGI sites -- universities, Federal research institutions, and other research partners -- at speeds 100 times faster than today's Internet, and connect on the order of 10 sites at speeds 1,000 times faster than the current Internet.   Revolutionary applications. Participating Federal agencies will develop and demonstrate a wide variety of nationally important applications that cannot be achieved over today's Internet. These applications will include Federal agency mission applications, university and public sector applications, and private sector applications with the potential to improve U.S. competitiveness in vital business areas. These revolutionary applications will also demonstrate the potential for opening entirely new business areas based on commercializing the technologies that are developed within the NGI initiative.   Federal agencies will begin the NGI initiative by constructing high performance collaborative networks in partnership with the telecommunications industry, Internet service providers, universities, and major Federal research institutions. Such networks will be created on the foundation of existing Federal networks (illustrated on this and the previous page), and will allow universities, Federal research institutions, and industry to conduct research and develop the services, protocols, and functionality needed to support next generation applications. In order to facilitate the development of these leading-edge applications, NGI will seek substantial matching funds from private sector partners, as well as commitments from major applications developers.   The potential economic benefits of this Federal initiative are enormous. Because the Internet originated in the U.S., American companies have seized and maintained a substantial lead in a variety of communications and information markets. The explosion of the Internet has generated economic growth, high-wage jobs, and a dramatic increase in the number of high-tech start-up companies. The NGI initiative will strengthen America's technological leadership and create new jobs and market opportunities in the next century.
Today's advanced federal networks	Even as the NGI initiative commences, the research and education communities continue to need ready access to high performance data networks in order to advance current research projects and educate U.S. citizens. Federal networks such as NSF's vBNS, DOE's ESnet, NASA's NREN, DOD's DREN, and the DARPA-led Advanced Technology Demonstration network (ATDnet) serve as the foundation for the NGI and continue to connect researchers and educators to information and computational resources. These networks also support networking research in gigabit testbeds, optical fiber networks, adaptive networks, and packetized video and voice.
Global Grid	To meet demand for very high bandwidth networks, terabit optical fiber networks with global reach will be required. At present, fiber networks use at most one percent of this potential capacity due to electronic bandwidth limitations. DARPA's Global Grid program is developing the network technologies, architectures, and protocols necessary to access the 30 TeraHerz (THz -- trillions of cycles per second) bandwidth using multiple channels and picosecond optical pulses.
Active Networks	The goal of DARPA's Active Networks program is to create a new networking platform that will prove flexible and extensible at runtime to accommodate the rapid evolution and deployment of networking technologies, as well as provide the increasingly sophisticated services demanded by Defense applications. The Active Networks architecture is based on a dynamic runtime environment that supports finely tuned control over network services. Flexible, efficient, and secure protocols are being prototyped.
Biomedical research	Many areas of biomedical research computing are too demanding to be pursued using conventional computers and networks. Of primary concern are structure determination by x-ray and magnetic resonance, structure prediction of nucleic acids and proteins, computational biochemistry, and problems that arise from modern molecular biology. Each of these research areas needs not only the latest in computational power, but faster networks than are currently commercially available. NIH supports research in providing biomedical researchers access to new network technologies.
Unified Medical Language System (UMLS)	With the large and rapidly growing number of computerized database resources and services offering bibliographic, full text, and factual data via the Internet, it is difficult for users to locate and process vital information. To facilitate complicated searches, the National Library of Medicine (NLM) is developing intelligent gateways among database services, using a Unified Medical Language System to account for the dissimilarity in the ways related information is classified in different automated systems. Intelligent-agent-mediated gateways will provide users with a single point of access to the information they need.
National center for Biotechnology Information	The growth of the Internet and the availability of higher bandwidth connections will also lead to a significantly greater user load on services such as text retrieval, sequence analysis, and 3-D structure comparisons. The expansion of the scientific literature database and increased linkage between literature and experimental databases will create additional demands. To accommodate these increased computing requirements, NLM's National center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) has the legislative mandate to create automated systems for storing and analyzing this vast and growing amount of data using technologies developed with LSN R&D, such as low cost compute servers for parallelizing repetitive database searches.
Crisis management	Many Federal agencies support R&D in crisis management and disaster planning. Since most national emergencies are related to the weather, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has a strong need to provide data, model results, and crisis response tools, including networking technologies, that are viable under emergency conditions. NOAA and other agencies are planning ahead for future network services, with an aim toward expanding the accessibility and increasing use of the technology, services, and information available within the Federal government to improve significantly the management of the nation's forecasting, preparedness, and response to crisis situations.