NCSA and MCI Communications Corporation used the country's most sophisticated new computer network to link an NCSA research scientist with participants at the COMDEX conference in Atlanta, April 24.
vBNS, or very high speed backbone network service, is an experimental broad bandwidth network that will connect NSF's supercomputing centers. It will serve as a national testbed for investigating the performance of the nation's emerging asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) infrastructure.
During the opening program at COMDEX, NCSA Senior Research Scientist and UIUC Professor of Biophysics Eric Jakobsson used the vBNS network to send color images from NCSA to MCI's CEO Bert Roberts on the showroom floor in Atlanta.
Jakobsson, a national leader in molecular biophysics, interacted in real time with the COMDEX audience and explained his work via vBNS. This demonstration showed that vBNS will enable researchers from around the country to work together simultaneously on different aspects of complex problems and instantly communicate their results.
"The vBNS presents an excellent opportunity for distributed systems research. The scale of the vBNS is as significant as the network technology itself," states Charlie Catlett, NCSA associate director of Computing and Communications (C&C). "The vBNS forms the world's largest, most diverse set of high-performance computers at speeds commensurate with local area networks. This resulting national metacomputer will be used by thousands of computational scientists presently researching Grand and National Challenges at the NSF-funded HPCC centers."
At the leading edge of networking technology, the vBNS's OC-3 lines' peak rate is 155 megabits per second (Mbps)-nearly four times the 45 megabit rate of the NSFNET Backbone's T3 connection. By early 1996, NSF expects vBNS to operate at OC-12 622 Mbps.
The vBNS employs ATM technology. ATM can be scaled between different physical media; therefore, upgrades in network links require simple changes in the interface cards of routers. ATM technology offers a more seamless integration of networks and carries both video and voice data on the same line. Another advantage of vBNS is that it uses off-the-shelf components.
"This was not a custom-built job," Randy Butler, technical program manager of C&C's Networking Development Group explains. "The vBNS is composed of all off-the-shelf components. You can buy the routers, switches, and other technology right from vendors. We didn't have to build any hardware or protocols."
The high-speed link between the supercomputing centers will have four commercially owned network access points: Hayward, CA; Chicago, IL; Pennsauken, NJ; and Washington, DC. These sites will serve as points of connectivity to other networks. Service providers, such as MCINet, may buy access to these four sites.
