Northwestern University, Ibm Announce New Advanced Internet Technology Research Center

EDP Weekly's IT Monitor, August 24, 1998

Northwestern University and IBM Corp., with support from Ameritech, Cisco and other corporate partners, plan to establish a new research center to advance next-generation Internet technologies. Initially, the Center will undertake cooperative projects with regional, national, and international research and education networks, say spokespersons for IBM and Northwestern, and will initiate large-scale projects in advanced, next generation Internet research, innovation and experimentation.

"Combining the efforts of educational institutions and corporate partners, this Center will be the incubator for advanced Internet applications. By accelerating the pace of Internet research and collaboration, the killer applications of the future will go beyond what we can imagine today," says John Patrick, vice president of Internet technology at IBM. "Like the Internet in the early 1990's, we expect the new applications and solutions to move quickly out of the research world into the business community."

The Center, which will open in late 1998, will establish strategic initiatives centered on advanced application design, new network services, and network performance. Applications will be specifically designed to take advantage of high performance networking. The Center will showcase examples of innovative technology solutions for the industrial sectors, corporate processes, education and personal communications.

The Director of the Center will be Joe Membretti, who will join the Information Technology Division of Northwestern University in this month. He will also continue his role as director of the Metropolitan Research and Education Network (MREN), one of the world's most advanced high performance networks.

The Center will have multiple sites on the Northwestern University campuses in Evanston and Chicago and at IBM facilities. The facilities are part of the MREN backbone. It will have testbed access to the multi-gigabit Internet2 backbone recently announced by UCAID, Cisco, Qwest and Nortel, coined Abilene. Leveraging the backbone, researchers, academics, entrepreneurs and participating corporate partners will be able to create prototypes of advanced Internet solutions.

"Collaborative work among universities, national laboratories and high technology corporations created the Internet. The Center will continue this tradition," says Mort Rahimi, vice president for information technology at Northwestern University.

"This Center continues the work that Ameritech and regional research institutions began five years ago in pioneering advanced applications for the Internet," adds Greg Brown, president of Ameritech Custom Business Services. "Chicago is well on its way to becoming one of the global hubs of the next generation Internet, and Ameritech is uniquely positioned to help deliver the infrastructure and expertise that will bring astounding benefits to researchers and ultimately businesses and consumers for years to come."

Northwestern University has one of the most powerful campus networks in the world. It is a founding member of the University Corporation for Advanced Internet Development (UCAID), a partnership of over 125 major research universities, which has established the Internet2 project. Northwestern University President Henry Bienen serves on the UCAID Board of Trustees.