Funds to support activities in Large Scale Networking for FY 1997 total approximately $260 million, compared to the FY 1996 Estimated budget of $284 million, a decrease of 8.5%.
DARPA plans to develop advanced multicast-based services to include refinements of collaboration systems and autonomous network processes. Emphasis will be placed on developing transport protocols, reference implementations, and demonstrations of applications such as real-time image understanding, target recognition, and autonomous navigation for reconnaissance and surveillance. DARPA, in collaboration with other agencies including NSA, will continue to develop an ATM network, with demonstrations of multimedia workstations and parallel computing technologies for medical imaging and scientific visualization. They will continue the development of optical switching and WDM devices to support up to 10Gb/s data rates. DARPA will finalize network control and management strategy of the WDM network and demonstrate WDM in a field trial at ATDnet. DARPA will deploy a reference implementation of a common base set of network infrastructure protocols and services necessary for secure and reliable network operation. Programs include wireless communications and wireless network access.
As a result of ongoing privatization, NSF will reduce support of commodity-level network services to educational institutions, and increase support of very high bandwidth services which focus on experimental applications of high bandwidth networks and international networking. Among the applications areas targeted for emphasis at NSF are distributed high performance computing, information based learning technologies, remote visualization and imaging, and tele-collaboration. NSF will support software systems research to enable the seamless convergence of computing and communications leading to a transparent information processing system. NSF will also support new applications of very high bandwidth communications demonstrating the integration of research and education. There will be increased emphasis on wireless communications and wireless network access, and on very broadband networks including optical networks.
The NASA projects formerly classified as IITA projects will all be completed in FY 1997, and no new projects in IITA will be started. NASA intends to upgrade the interconnect between the ESS and CAS testbeds to 622 Mb/s. They will demonstrate network technologies needed for network management, cost accounting, security, and support of high performance applications in the NII.
The Digital Library projects, a joint research initiative with NSF, DARPA and NASA, will continue; related new work in very large databases and knowledge repositories will be supported.
DOE will prototype a system allowing multiple commercial building monitoring and operations from a single remotely sited control room. ESNet bandwidth services will be upgraded as budget allows, to support high speed Program Integration and Advanced Computational Testing and Simulation applications.
NSA will continue to develop LIGHTNING, a project to provide support for a WDM testbed. It will also develop an optically addressed spatial light modulator and complete development of the superconducting crossbar switch and associated electronics. It plans to transition out-of-band network control for ATM to multi-wavelength overlay terminal devices in anticipation of FY 1998-1999 testing of multi-wavelength switching devices on the ATDnet testbed multi-wavelength overlay. NSA will begin implementation and multi-network testing of interoperable network management over ATDnet and attached networks.
NIH will continue funding projects promoting the application of HPCC technologies to health care, the evaluation of telemedicine, and the testing of methods for protecting the privacy of electronic health data. There will also be a special emphasis on R&D for computer-based patient records and public health applications of the NII. NIH will deploy new capabilities for automatic source selection and for retrieving and sorting information from multiple databases both within the Internet Grateful Med and Unified Medical Language System (UMLS). The scheduled increase in the number of funded genome centers will increase sequence data output to greater than 500,000 sequences per year. One of the goals of the program is to bring 3,000 health care institutions on to the Internet.
NIST will collaborate with industry and standards bodies to support the specification, development, validation, and testing of standards and interoperation of conforming products. NIST will initiate R&D related to passive optical, non-ATM networks and R&D related to coding and compression, and related testing technologies for wireless networks.
The VA intends to develop and test an interactive voice response system to enable access to information from existing VA computer systems 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. They will test and select clinical and administrative projects for migration to multiple facilities and develop a prototype epidemiological server for use by clinicians and clinical researchers. VA intends to enhance and test its Computerized Patient Record System.
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