Spring 2002
Internet2 Member Meeting

Summary: Spring 2002 Internet2 Member Meeting

Collaboration, engagement, and a look to the future were central themes at the Spring 2002 Internet2 Member Meeting held May 6-8, 2002 at the Crystal Gateway Marriott Hotel in Arlington, Virginia. Approximately 650 people attended the meeting, which offered more than 30 track sessions in Advanced Applications, Middleware, Network Planning and Engineering, and Relationships and Partnerships. In addition, 20 tutorials, workshops, birds-of-a-feather sessions and open working group meetings were held. A workshop to train Internet2 Commons site coordinators was held on May 8 and 9.

Numerous federal agencies were represented at the spring meeting. Collaborations among universities, corporations, and international networking organizations were also well represented.

The Welcome Reception for attendees featured a remote performance demonstration by the New World Symphony, and gave attendees and opportunity to network with congressional and federal agency representatives.

Here are some additional highlights of the meeting:
At the Opening Plenary, Internet2 President Doug Van Houweling's welcoming remarks were followed by a presentation of the 2002 Internet2 Land Speed Record by Rich Carlson, network research scientist at Argonne National Labs. The award recipients were part of a team from the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, the Faculty of Science of the University of Amsterdam and SURFnet, the national computer network for higher education and research in the Netherlands. The team transferred 625 M of data across 12,272 kilometers from Fairbanks, Alaska to Amsterdam in the Netherlands at 401 megabits per second using the networking capabilities of the Pacific Northwest GigaPoP, an access point to leading-edge networks; the Internet2 Abilene backbone network; StarLight, the advanced optical infrastructure and proving ground in Chicago, Illinois; and SURFnet. Presentation: [htm]

Following the award presentation, a panel updated attendees on optical networking and grids as they relate to the advanced networking requirements of the scientific communities. Panel participants included Charlie Catlett, senior fellow at Argonne National Labs; Steve Corbato, director of Backbone Network Infrastructure for Abilene/Internet2; Michael McRobbie, vice president for information technology at Indiana University; and Harvey Newman, professor of physics at the California Institute of Technology. Presentations: [htm] [htm] [htm] [htm]

During the Closing Plenary, Steven Sample, President of the University of Southern California, gave a preview of plans for the Fall 2002 Internet2 Meeting, which will be hosted by the USC. Sample was followed by two presentations on network security issues and progress in infrastructure security. Howard Schmidt, vice-chair of the President's Critical Infrastructure Protection Board, spoke on the scope, functioning, and future priorities of the Protection Board. Mike Roberts, senior advisor, Internet2 Network Security, reported on activities and future plans of the Internet2/EDUCAUSE Systems Security Task Force effort. Presentation: [htm]

This spring's meeting included open meetings of the Network Planning and Policy Advisory Council and the Applications Strategy Council. Live netcasts of the CENIC 2002 meeting in San Diego were also available to attendees.

Funding for high-performance networks was the topic of a birds-of-a-feather session entitled "Campus Network Funding--Strategies and Challenges." Internet2 members from Northwestern University, the University of Wisconsin, the University of Maryland-Baltimore County, and the University of Notre Dame gave brief overviews of their strategies for supporting continued investments in high-performance networking and advanced applications on their campuses. The presentations were followed by a lively discussion among the attendees. For a PDF-formatted summary of this session, click here.

Attendees saw advanced applications demos on the following topics: coherent medical informatics, digital video transport system, high bandwidth video over the Internet backplane protocol (video IBPster), interactive shared education environment, Shibboleth, Stanford virtual auditorium, and visible embryo.

Poster sessions at the meeting featured current work under way at Internet2 corporate members and international partner organizations. These included the Greek Research and Technology Network's GRNET2; Juniper Networks T640 Internet Routing Node, Multicast Technologies IP Multicast, the GALAXY Project of Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT Laboratories-Japan); RADVISION's Voice and Video over IP, and various activities at TERENA.