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NCSA and Kurchatov Institute Select Teleglobe to Provide FASTnet High Performance Network Linking U.S. and Russiareleased December 17, 2001
Contacts National Science Foundation and Russian Ministry of Industry, Science and Technology Fund New High Speed Network For Scientific CollaborationRESTON, VA and MOSCOW, RUSSIA — The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) and the Kurchatov Institute, top research institutions in the U.S. and Russia respectively, today announced they have selected Teleglobe (NYSE, TSE: BCE), the e-World Communications Company, to develop a 155 megabit per second (Mbps) high-performance network connection that will give the two countries' scientific communities unprecedented access to each other and facilitate joint scientific and educational projects. The link, called FASTnet (For Advanced Science and Technology Network), is funded in part by a $2 million grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) to NCSA at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Russian support for the link is from the Russian Ministry of Industry, Science and Technology. FASTnet supports a strong alliance among NCSA, the Russian Research Center Kurchatov Institute in Moscow, the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Moscow-based Joint Supercomputer Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and Teleglobe. The FASTnet network will increase the bandwidth between the U.S. and Russia by orders of magnitude. FASTnet will facilitate communications through high quality video-conferencing that has never been possible on such a wide basis between the U.S. and Russian scientific communities. The network's capabilities will be put to use during the U.S.-Russian Science and Technology Dialog series of science and technology working groups in nine different scientific disciplines, scheduled to begin next month. Following these dialogs, the discussions will expand to a broader range of topics and disciplines. "FASTnet represents a new level of communication infrastructure between the U.S. and Russia and it introduces new possibilities for collaboration and cooperative work," said Dan Reed, director of NCSA and the National Computational Science Alliance. "The primary purpose of this network infrastructure is to enable scientists in both countries to explore new research opportunities in a variety of disciplines." Among those are joint responses to natural and man-made disasters, safeguards of nuclear material, better understanding of the human genome, joint exploration of space, distributed monitoring of seismic events, high energy physics collaborations, and atmospheric and other environmental studies and simulations. "Research collaborations with Russia are important to the U.S. science and engineering community," said Aubrey Bush, director of the NSF Division for Advanced Networking and Research. "The FASTnet team of Greg Cole and Natasha Bulashova have done an excellent job of building the international partnerships that are making this advanced network a significant resource in both our countries." "Teleglobe has been an active participant in experiments involving the United States, Canadian, European and Asian research networks since 1994, when we first demonstrated transatlantic connectivity between the Canadian national research and education network and a meeting of telecommunications ministers in Belgium," said Greg Ewert, Teleglobe's vice president of data and Internet. "We are honored to have a role in advancing scientific and educational communications between the United States and Russia." FASTnet represents one of approximately 20 programs and activities proposed by NCSA and the Kurchatov Institute that will bring together the U.S. and Russian scientific and education communities through advanced information infrastructures or grids. A grid links research teams or individuals to each other and a vast array of online resources, including computing systems, advanced applications, scientific instruments, visualization systems and multimedia services. By connecting Russia to the U.S. through the Chicago-based StarLight optical access point, the FASTnet network will provide Russian scientists, educators and students direct connectivity to the common interconnection point for global research and education networks. The connectivity enables both collaboration and the development of new Internet technology including wavelength switching and other grid networks. These North American research and education networks include Abilene, vBNS, CANARIE and ESnet. FASTnet will serve as the networking foundation for two Russian grid projects planned jointly by NCSA and the Kurchatov Institute: Nauka-Grid, which will connect Russian scientific organizations across the country and link them to online resources; and CIV-Grid, a similar project that aims to link civilians. For more information, visit http://www.friends-partners.org/fastnet/ for the U.S. (U.S. site) or http://www.friends-partners.ru/ (Russian site). The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is a leader in developing and deploying cutting-edge high-performance computing, networking and information technologies. NCSA is a partner in the TeraGrid project, a National Science Foundation initiative to build and deploy the world's largest, fastest, most comprehensive, distributed infrastructure for open scientific research. NCSA also leads the National Computational Science Alliance (Alliance), a partnership to prototype an advanced computational infrastructure for the 21st century that includes more than 50 academic, government and industry research partners. The NSF Partnerships for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (PACI) program funds the Alliance. In addition to the NSF, NCSA receives support from the state of Illinois, the University of Illinois, private sector partners, and other federal agencies. For more information, visit http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/. Teleglobe, a leading provider of global communications and eBusiness services, enables its customers to maximize the potential of the Internet through delivery of hosting services, content distribution and global connectivity. With a lit capacity of 10 million+ Gbps-miles, 149 POPs and approximately 300,000 square feet of hosting facilities (year-end 2001), Teleglobe is one of the world's largest international Internet backbones serving a broad base of enterprise, Internet content provider (ICP), Internet service provider (ISP), application service provider (ASP) and carrier customers. Teleglobe is expanding its network with its GlobeSystem initiative, a multi-billion dollar IP network and hosting deployment. For more information, visit http://www.teleglobe.com/. This release contains information about management's view of Teleglobe's future expectations, plans and prospects that constitute forward looking statements for purposes of the safe harbor provisions under The Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Actual results may differ materially from those indicated by these forward-looking statements, as a result of a variety of factors including, but not limited to, competitive developments, risks associated with Teleglobe's growth, the development of the Internet market, regulatory risks and other factors that are discussed in Teleglobe's Annual Information Form and other documents periodically filed with the SEC.
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