| Cyberspace
gets a little bigger
by Heather Hayes
Virginia Business
May 2005
The Internet may be faster
than the U.S. mail but it’s still not quite robust enough for all users,
including quite a few in the academic community and
private sector. But Virginia universities — and
Virginia businesses — are about to have access
to a network with enough capacity and speed to transmit
even the largest programs and calculations.
The presidents of the state’s
six research universities recently announced a soon-to-be-available
statewide
optical fiber network known as VORTEX, which will not
only connect academic researchers across the state
but will also be available for business applications.
Participating universities are the University of
Virginia, Virginia Tech, the College of William and
Mary, Virginia Commonwealth University, George Mason
University and Old Dominion University.
Construction of the network should be finished by
July. VORTEX will ultimately hook into the National
LambaRail, a new national research networking backbone
for scientists, engineers and innovators that runs
at speeds of 400 gigabytes per second, or 40 times
faster than Internet 2, the next-generation of Internet
technology.
“This is going to enable what we in academia
refer to as ‘Big Science,’ or those projects
that involve lots of partner universities working on
projects that require a tremendous amount of computing
power,” says Jeff Crowder, director of strategic
initiatives and information technology at Virginia
Tech. With VORTEX, scientists across the country will
be able to access the university’s System 10
supercomputer.
Virginia’s network will
be commercially owned and available. VORTEX is being
built by Verizon, which
plans to make any excess capacity available to businesses.
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