News for and about the Internet2 community

[Todd Sedmak <>]

Higher Education Leaders Announce Disruptive Technologies to Advance U.S. 
Scientific Research and Help Reduce Higher Education Costs

Arizona State, Case Western Reserve, Cincinnati, Clemson, Georgia Tech, 
Indiana, Ohio State, and regional partners OARnet, I-Light and SOX pilot 
innovations and “Big Data” needs of global researchers

Arlington, VA—April 25, 2012—Senior, higher education executives announced 
today that they will use the nation’s fastest, coast-to-coast network to 
implement new technologies that support scientific “Big Data” and cloud 
applications to drive innovation in global collaborative research. The intent 
is to strengthen the nation’s position as a global leader in research and 
education for decades to come, and at the same time help control higher 
education costs.

The technologies bundled in the Internet2 Network create the first open, 
national-scale testbed of revolutionary Software Defined Networking (SDN) and 
OpenFlow standards, combined with the abundant bandwidth of the world’s first 
transcontinental network deployment of 100G technology. These unique, 
disruptive technologies are key components of the Internet2 Innovation 
Platform.

“Connecting to Internet2’s Innovation Platform will greatly advance research 
and job growth across Ohio's higher education, medical research, 
manufacturing, and technology networking corridors,” said Pankaj Shah, 
executive director of OARnet, which is one of 10 organizations announcing 
their intent to pilot the Internet2 Innovation Platform technologies. “Across 
the nation sectors such as health care, agriculture, and engineering  --in 
conjunction with research and economic development efforts -- produce 
enormous volumes of data. By connecting to Internet2’s 100 Gigabit per second 
platform, Ohio's and the other organizations' ability to analyze this data 
and collaborate globally increases exponentially.”

Along with OARnet, Arizona State University, Case Western Reserve University, 
Clemson University, Georgia Tech, Indiana University, The Ohio State 
University, the University of Cincinnati and regional networks including 
I-Light (Indiana) and Southern-Crossroads (SOX) announced their intent to 
pilot the Internet2 Innovation Platform technologies.

Policy and industry leaders are also beginning to recognize the power of 
these technologies. Last week, Google publicly embraced SDN and OpenFlow at 
the Open Networking Summit in Santa Clara, CA. Urs Hölzle, senior vice 
president, technical infrastructure for Google called the idea behind these 
advances, “the most significant change in networking in the entire lifetime 
of Google.”

Further, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy recently 
announced the “Big Data Research and Development Initiative” to accelerate 
the pace of discovery in research and transform teaching and learning. The 
National Science Foundation (NSF) is a co-sponsoring department of the 
solicitation, and the NSF-funded GENI program has been a long-time advocate 
for SDN to support experimental networks.

Chip Elliot, project director for the GENI Project Office (GPO) stated, "The 
combination of research and education, business, and policy leaders 
recognizing and implementing the power of these new technologies is the spark 
needed for the next generation of innovative applications to flourish.”

Though the Internet2 community has been experimenting with SDN and 100G 
technologies for some time, the need for the combination of these advanced 
technologies into a unified set of solutions that universities can implement 
is just in time, according to Clemson University CIO Jim Bottum. “We are at a 
crossroads in terms of network innovation. The commercial sector is reaching 
a maturity level where incremental changes are the norm. The research and 
education communities have always been the change agent for new networking 
innovation and at this time it is more important than ever that we lead this 
effort. We need to reinvigorate our community and move to support all aspects 
– production, research and education.”

Researchers studying clean energy, climate change, cancer cures, astronomy, 
high-energy physics, and other important global sciences have urgent needs to 
reliably and securely exchange “Big Data” produced by their experiments at 
the press of a button, instead of shipping physical data storage media across 
the country and the world.

Equally important are more efficient, better-yielding technology solutions 
for university business functions in efforts to reduce higher education 
costs. The Internet2 Innovation Platform technologies provide solutions for 
secure and reliable data transmissions into a cloud environment, and support 
for the exploding use of bandwidth-consuming multimedia in modern education 
delivery, among other applications university leaders can use to transform 
higher education models.

“The research and education community has played a seminal role in the 
creation of the modern Internet and the applications that have made it one of 
the most transformative technologies of our lifetime,” said Dave Lambert, 
Internet2 President and CEO. “The Internet we know today and the new global 
markets it created are largely the result of early investments by university 
network leaders. Getting these revolutionary technologies in the hands of 
Internet2 community members will have positive and fundamentally 
transformative effects on research and education – the lynchpins of the 
global economy.”
About Internet2

Internet2® is a member-owned advanced technology community founded by the 
nation's leading higher education institutions in 1996. Internet2 provides a 
collaborative environment for U.S. research and education organizations to 
solve common technology challenges, and to develop innovative solutions in 
support of their educational, research, and community service missions. For 
more information, visit www.internet2.edu.
For media assistance, contact Todd Sedmak at 804-497-0282 or 
.


Todd Sedmak
Internet2
PR and Media Relations Manager
202-331-5373 (w), 804-497-0282 (c) or 


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