Working to ease your commute
Thursday, March 08, 2007
Ken Frazier is serving as interim Director of DoIT and campus Chief Information Officer. Frazier is also Director of UW's General Library System.
Anyone commuting through severe weather or on a congested freeway appreciates the importance of an alternate route. The same is true for Internet traffic.
The UW must have alternate routes for the increasingly heavy loads we send to researchers at peer institutions throughout the world. It is even more important that these routes be made available affordably, before traffic gets worse.
Several years ago, my CIO predecessor, Annie Stunden, and a few others from the northern states looked at a map of the Internet2 routes. They noticed a gap from Madison to the northwest where no “heavy traffic” could go. The first step toward addressing the gap was BOREAS-Net, a consortium of four research institutions: the universities of Minnesota, Iowa, and Wisconsin and Iowa State University.
I'm pleased to announce that BOREAS-Net is up and running. As of late January, this new Regional Optical Network is serving the advanced production and experimental network requirements of these schools. I should add that the UW has the privilege of being selected to provide support for the network, through WiscNet.
High-speed optical network capability is essential for our researchers to move vast amounts of research data to other researchers worldwide and to engage in collaborative research activities with peer institutions and national laboratories. This capability is also necessary for our institutions to compete effectively for research funding, and even to recruit and retain top research faculty.
BOREAS-Net was just the first step. The Northern Tier Network Consortium (NTNC) is the second group seeking to close the larger northern networking gap. NTNC is an alliance of universities, research labs, network organizations, and some state network organizations across the northern part of our country from Lake Michigan to the Pacific. BOREAS-Net members are also part of NTNC. Together, we are working to provide excellent network capability and connections to the national research network for all of our member institutions - a 2,100-mile swath of connectivity.
A Research Support Workgroup has been formed at UW-Madison to help researchers acquire and use the technologies needed to further their studies. I encourage researchers to contact DoIT for more information about their specific grant applications and how they might use BOREAS-Net.
For more information about the NTNC, see www.ntnc.org. For details on BOREAS-Net, see www.boreas.net.