The need for speed - NASA developing Next Generation Internet - Internet/Web/Online Service Information - Brief Article

Software Magazine, Dec, 1997 by John Mello

NASA's NGI initiative aims to fuel-inject a new and improved Internet

Can you imagine an Internet a thousand times faster than the one operating today? The space cadets at NASA can. And more than just preaching the gospel on this speed demon, they've been funding projects to make it a reality.

According to Christine Falsetti, project manager for advanced networking at the agency, Congress appropriated $85 million to jump-start the NASA initiative, called Next Generation Internet (NGI). With that money, NASA hopes to increase the capacity of its test beds, extending them beyond its facilities to other federal agencies.

Within a year NASA expects to goose the speed in those test beds -- which currently run at 155 megabits per second -- to 622 megabits per second. And in two years, the agency hopes to reach 2 gigabits per second.

In addition to improving network speeds, NASA will be funding research that will look into adding intelligence to networks. According to Falsetti, today's networks treat all their users like standby passengers. What's needed is a way to prioritize traffic on the network, she contends. "It a doctor is doing telesurgery, you'd want him to have a higher priority on the system than someone engaging in a chat session," she explains.

A third part of the initiative involves advanced applications -- ones that need chrome-burning speed to be practical. When someone uses one of NASA's wind tunnels, for example, they need to send a team to the agency's facilities to conduct their experiments. "We'd like them to be able to do that remotely," Falsetti says. To do that, the team has to be interacting instantaneously in cyberspace, which means they must be interacting on a very fast network.

While NASA juices its test beds, the National Science Foundation is furthering Internet research by awarding grants to universities and plugging them into its high-speed Backbone Network Service (vBNS). That network is expected to play a central role in developing the Internet of the future by tying together 100 universities and their research partners.

Despite the enthusiasm on the part of NASA and others over the work, Robert Metcalfe, who invented Ethernet and is currently a vice president for technology at International Data Group, is wary of the NASA and the NSF' Internet initiatives. "Government sponsorship of research on networking at universities is a good thing," he says. "But having the government build a new Internet because the Internet we have doesn't work doesn't seem like a good idea to me. And if it's a jobs program for the government labs, then it's a really bad idea."