Moving towards the next gen Inet....

How do you motivate researchers to move toward a next generation Internet? In 2006 the Internet2 consortium began awarding the IDEA (Internet2 Driving Exemplary Applications) Award to those who "represent applied advanced networking at its best, and hold the promise to increase the impact of next-generation networks around the world".

Judges use the following criteria for determining winners:

1. the positive impact of the application for its users
2. the technical merit of the application
3. the application's impact and likelihood of broader adoption

The IDEA awards have been presented in 2006, 2007 and 2008. Each year, a few different awards are given. A few of the more interesting winners, in my opinion are:

2006 - Interactive Music Education: Member universities, using the Internet2 backbone, host live interactive music classes, symposiums, and coaching sessions for their music programs. These programs connect living composers and conductors, too busy to take part in a formal university schedule, interact with students and faculty. The use of this network also allows potential students to audition for programs without the need for travel, opening up opportunities for students never available before.

I find this award-winning program interesting because of the very nature of their use of the Internet2. The type of streaming and multicasting speeds required for a conductor in one location to lead students at another location is difficult to attain with the Internet of today. Equally 'impossible' would be for students at several locations to play musical pieces simultaneously. Although our Internet of today has made great leaps and bounds for delivering multi-media to our homes and businesses, the concept of truly 'live' interaction is still a ways away.

2007 - Ultralight: This project links several next-generation networks together in a managed network-aware grid for the purposes of advancing new physics research projects such as CERN's LHC (Large Hadron Collider,) CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid) and ATLAS. Each of these projects has more than 2000 scientists, physicists and engineers from around the globe working together. These projects generate petabytes of data which is shared and processed by more than 100 facilities today.

This existence of high-speed, secure networks on a global scale is interesting to me because it shows how far we've come in the science community in such a short period of time. What else would Newton have discovered if he was collaborating with 1000 other scientists in his time? The LHC project is expected to generate Exabytes of data within the next decade, so the need for higher-speed network that has a reliable quality of service (QoS) and is secure is apparent. I can only imagine that the rate of our scientific discoveries will continue to be exponential.

2008 - Transforming High-Angular Resolution Astrophysics: radio telescopes across the world are networked and use VLBI (Very Long Baseline Interferometry) to create high-resolution images of radio sources of cosmic origin. Having these telescopes networked allow them to capture and record very brief cosmic events for several locations, providing different 'slices' of the same image. This allows the astronomers to tweak their instrumentation to get the most of them while analyzing astronomical events.

This project, like the others I listed, shows how continued efforts to collaborate on a wider, if not global scale can only enhance contributions to arts and sciences. The impact the Internet has had in the last decade, and future generation Internets will have in the future will never cease to amaze me. This level of global connectivity is still new to us, and I believe that way more good has come out of it than bad. I hope that the next generation of inhabitants on our planet will fully appreciate the advances made by the original Internet and are being made and will be made by next generation Internets.