Congratulations to SURA!!! And a special thank you to Ed Fantegrossi, the GEO team, and our hard working Chair of the IEEAF Board... Don Riley! The agreement was made possible as a result of SURA-IEEAF partnership.
AT&T, Southeastern Universities Research Association (SURA) Announce Agreement to Advance Nation's Grid Networking Infrastructure
AT&T will make 8,000 miles of dark fiber available to the research and education community
Washington, D.C., December 16, 2003 - AT&T and the Southeastern Universities Research Association (SURA) announced today a collaboration agreement that will allow the nation's research and education community to use AT&T's newest national network infrastructure for experimental work on the next generation of networking technology and applications, called Grid networking.
The collaboration agreement is designed to speed the creation of regional and national Grid services to support the nation's research and education (R&E) community. AT&T will make available, at no cost to SURA and the nation's R&E community, 8,000 miles of dark fiber network as well as a substantial inventory of optical networking equipment. These assets will be used to develop experimental network services to support advanced research that would not be possible using a commercial network. AT&T also will lease to SURA and its partners additional network facilities and capacity as needed. The company will make its network assets available through USAWaves, an R&E networking initiative created by SURA.
Grid networking enables computing facilities, scientific data repositories and applications to be shared, allowing researchers to more rapidly solve complex problems, conduct computer-intensive research or analyze vast amounts of data. For example, advances in the areas of database mining, particle detectors, telescope observatories, electron microscopes and technical testing devices are all being networked, allowing data to be shared, managed and accessed. The promise of high-end grid computing will become possible when high-capacity optical networks are available to the R&E community.
"As a pioneer in next-generation networking technologies, AT&T is looking forward to working with the nation's R&E community to establish a new core network infrastructure for emerging computing grids," said Hossein Eslambolchi, President of AT&T Labs and AT&T's Chief Technology Officer. "We want to help scientists in the U.S. to continue to lead the world in the field of networking. Additionally, we want to extend the availability of AT&T's leading edge network resources beyond top-tier research institutions to include universities that until now have not enjoyed access to high-speed facilities. Finally, we plan to leverage what we jointly learn and build with the R&E community to advance AT&T's leadership in the commercial grid connectivity business."
"We are extremely pleased that AT&T is taking this innovative approach in collaboration with SURA," said Louisiana State University Chancellor and Chair of SURA's Council of Presidents, Mark Emmert. "This agreement is a very important step in helping to realize a vision for a new national optical networking capability for research and education - a vision that has been clearly articulated by SURA's most prominent institutional leaders."
This collaboration with AT&T will help advance a number of regional initiatives that require advanced network infrastructure and services, including several R&E optical networking initiatives currently underway in Virginia, Georgia, Florida, Louisiana, Texas and Oklahoma. Also within the SURA region, the Southern Governors' Association (SGA) is pursuing a number of initiatives that can benefit from this agreement. These include the Southern States high performance network Grid, the Southern eCorridors Project for economic development and a Southern Governors' Telehealth initiative. SURA has been working with the SGA to define and develop strategies for implementing these initiatives.
A group of U.S. research institutions and private sector technology companies have launched the National LambdaRail (NLR) project to provide a national infrastructure for research and experimentation in networking technologies and applications. Five of the NLR access nodes are expected to be established in the SURA region. Through USAWaves, SURA expects to contribute to extending the reach of NLR, and as a result, enhance scientific research capacity and improve the competitive position of the South in the national and global economies.
Today's announcement is the result of a SURA-sponsored study by Geographic Network Affiliates, Inc. (GEO) and the Internet Educational Equal Access Foundation (IEEAF) to identify potential corporate partners in developing a new set of network services to support and strengthen education and scientific research in the South. "While there were many people involved in this effort, GEO Chairman Ed Fantegrossi and IEEAF Board Chair Don Riley of the University of Maryland have provided SURA with valuable insight and assistance throughout the development of this agreement with AT&T," notes SURA President Jerry P. Draayer. "Their integrity, vision and steadfast commitment to closing the digital divide have been key to the success of this effort. With this agreement in place, SURA is ready to take an active role in enabling grid computing capabilities in the SURA region and the nation."
# # #
About AT&T
For more than 125 years, AT&T (NYSE "T") has been known for unparalleled quality and reliability in communications. Backed by the research and development capabilities of AT&T Labs, the company is a global leader in local, long distance, Internet and transaction-based voice and data services. For more information, visit www.att.com.
About SURA
The Southeastern Universities Research Association (SURA) is a consortium of over 60 leading research institutions in the southern United States and the District of Columbia established in 1980 as a non-stock, nonprofit corporation. SURA serves as an entity through which colleges, universities, and other organizations may cooperate with one another, government and industry in acquiring, developing, and using laboratories and other research facilities and in furthering knowledge and the application of that knowledge in the physical, biological, and other natural sciences and engineering. For more information, visit www.sura.org.
SURA Contact: AT&T Contact:
Sue Fratkin Jim McGann
202-408-7872 703-506-5524
Widespread Support for AT&T-SURA Collaboration Agreement
“The fiscal health and economic viability of the south and the nation is dependent on our ability to create a world-class environment for educating our children and our workforce. AT&T's commitment to assist the nation's higher education community in creating a new networking infrastructure dedicated to research and education is a great example of a public-private partnership aimed at securing our nation's leadership role in scientific research and education."
Mark Warner, Governor of Virginia, Chairman, Southern Governors’ Association
~ ~ ~
“This commitment from AT&T is a significant step towards creating the next generation optical networking facilities that are critical to the future of research and education across the United States. I applaud SURA’s leadership in securing this commitment on behalf of its membership in the Southeast and their research partners around the country.”
Douglas Van Houweling, President and CEO of Internet2
~ ~ ~
“SURA’s collaboration with AT&T is a valuable complement to National LambdaRail’s optical network infrastructure, providing critical resources in establishing regional optical networks. These regional networks will be a critical success factor in enabling optical networking capabilities for the widest possible audience.”
Tracy Futhey, Vice President of Information Technology and Chief Information Officer at Duke University and chair of the NLR Board of Directors
~ ~ ~
“AT&T has always had the best network and now they are rolling up their sleeves to help enable the new grid technologies in this team collaboration. SURA’s commitment to playing a leadership role in creating a new critical infrastructure of fiber assets that could be made broadly available to the national research and education community via the USAWaves National Buyers Cooperative was critical.”
Ed Fantegrossi, Chairman of Geographic Network Affiliates International
~ ~ ~
“On behalf of CANARIE I congratulate SURA on this very exciting initiative. Both SURA and AT&T should be particularly commended for their foresight and vision in making possible such a motivating project. Not only will the GridFiber program have significant impact on the future of research and education in the southern states, but more importantly, it will have far reaching benefits for the next generation of businesses and industry who will be dependent on this future architecture being pioneered by SURA and AT&T.”
Bill St. Arnaud, Senior Director of Advanced Networks for CANARIE
~ ~ ~
“This is a far sighted and ground-breaking partnership that will enable a new world of opportunities to use broadband networks to bring top quality health care and public health services to rural areas, and to universities, hospitals and other research institutions throughout the region and beyond to directly participate in leading-edge scientific and medical research programs.”
Ron Johnson, Vice President and Vice Provost of the University of Washington
~ ~ ~
“This decade, e-science will generate terabytes – and petabytes – of research data that must routinely move back and forth among colleagues at universities and government institutions. E-scientists must have guaranteed bandwidth, latency, and deterministic throughput on their networks, just as they must know exactly when they can analyze data on a supercomputer or where they can reliably store data. E-scientists want to take advantage of advanced Internet protocols and switching implementations that are currently under development but not yet in use on the general shared Internet. Powered by appropriate application-centric middleware over dedicated wavelengths connecting key cities, the AT&T donation of 8,000 miles of fiber to SURA will be a resource that will accelerate our scientific community’s ability to undertake important research by accessing enormous amounts of data regionally, nationally and globally.”
Tom DeFanti, Director of the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL), Maxine Brown, Associate Director of EVL, and Joe Mambretti, Director of the International Center for Advanced Internet Research (iCAIR), StarLight management
~ ~ ~
“This is a major step towards the next generation of networks and Grid systems, enabling thousands of high energy physicists, astrophysicists and scientists in many other data intensive fields to access, process and analyze Petabyte-scale data, both within the US and internationally, leading to the next round of discoveries. By using USAWaves in regions of the US complementary to the National LambdaRail, scientists throughout the nation will be able to partner with international optical network projects such as DataTAG, UltraLight, Netherlight, Translight and UKlight to achieve their frontier science goals while at the same time building a new class of global networks combining static provisioning and dynamically constructed optical paths, in ways that could revolutionize our ability to share data and communicate in many walks of life.”
Harvey Newman, Professor Physics, Caltech, Chair, Standing Committee on Inter-regional Connectivity, International Committee on Future Accelerators
December 16, 2003
Background: AT&T – SURA Grid Collaboration Agreement
Today’s collaboration agreement between AT&T and SURA evolved from a SURA-sponsored study to identify potential corporate partners in the development of a new set of network services, to support education and scientific research in the South. This study was undertaken based on a challenge from the SURA Council of Presidents (comprised of Presidents and Chancellors of SURA member universities) to aggressively seek innovative approaches to strengthen the scientific and technical capabilities of the region. One of the outcomes of this search for innovation was the development of a regional networking infrastructure known as the SURA Crossroads Initiative, which seeks to leverage the collective requirements and buying power of SURA members to dramatically reduce the cost of advanced network connectivity. The AT&T collaboration furthers the goal of this initiative by bringing this connectivity not just to member institutions, but to research and educational institutions nationwide.
The following provides additional background information on the parties involved in making this agreement possible, and those who have lent their support:
About the Southern Governors’ Association www.southerngovernors.org
Founded in 1934, SGA is the oldest and historically the largest of the regional governors' associations. Since its first meeting 69 years ago to discuss the repeal of discriminatory rates for transporting goods by rail, the Southern Governors' Association has represented the common interests of Southern states' chief executives and provided a vehicle for promoting them. The ongoing mission of SGA is to support the work of the governors by providing a bipartisan, regional forum to help shape and implement national policy and to solve state and regional problems. For more information about the Southern Governors’ Association and their support for a Southern States high performance network Grid see: http://www.southerngovernors.org/resolutions/index.html
About StarLight www.startap.net/starlight
StarLight is an advanced optical infrastructure and proving ground for network services optimized for high-performance applications. Operational since summer 2001, StarLight is a 1GE and 10GEswitch/routerfacility for high-performance access to participating networks and also offers true optical switching for wavelengths. StarLight is being developed by the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), the International Center for Advanced Internet Research (iCAIR) at Northwestern University, and the Mathematics and Computer Science Division at Argonne National Laboratory, in partnership with Canada's CANARIE and the Netherlands' SURFnet. STARTAP and StarLight are made possible by major funding from the US National Science Foundation to UIC. StarLight is a service mark of the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois.
About Internet2 www.internet2.edu
Internet2 is a consortium being led by 205 universities working in partnership with industry and government to develop and deploy advanced network applications and technologies, accelerating the creation of tomorrow's Internet. Internet2 is recreating the partnership among academia, industry and government that fostered today´s Internet in its infancy.
About CANARIE www.canarie.ca
CANARIE Inc. - Canada's advanced Internet development organization - is a not-for-profit corporation supported by its members, project partners and the Federal Government. CANARIE's mission is to accelerate Canada's advanced Internet development and use by facilitating the widespread adoption of faster, more efficient networks and by enabling the next generation of advanced products, applications and services to run on them. Headquartered in Ottawa, Ontario, CANARIE employs 31 full-time staff dedicated to the research and implementation of advanced networks and applications that will stimulate economic growth and increase Canada's international competitiveness.
CANARIE has already succeeded in enhancing Canadian R&D Internet speeds by a factor of almost one million since its inception in 1993. The organization has also funded numerous advanced Internet applications projects, providing some 500 companies with the opportunity to achieve business success through innovation. CANARIE also intends to act as a catalyst and partner with governments, industry and the research community to increase overall IT awareness, ensure continuing promotion of Canadian technological excellence and ultimately, foster long-term productivity and improvement of living standards.
About Geographic Network Affiliates International www.geo-usa.com
Geographic Network Affiliates is a real estate developer specializing in data center and communications infrastructure around the world. GEO through it's design and build organization, DP facilities, has built over 700 switch and data centers for carriers, banks, and brokerage houses.
The Internet Educational Equal Access Foundation (IEEAF) is a non-profit organization whose mission is to obtain donations of telecommunications capacity and equipment and make them available for use by the global research and education community. Through partnerships and alliances between government, private sector entities, educational institutions and other non-profit organizations, IEEAF fosters global educational collaboration and equitable access to network resources: the “Global Quilt”. IEEAF’s member institutions include the Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California (CENIC - represented by California State University at Hayward, California State University System Office, and University of Southern California), the Pacific Northwest Gigapop (represented by University of Washington), the Pacific Internet2 Coalition (represented by University of Hawaii), the University of Maryland, Keio University and the WIDE Project (Japan), SURFNet (Netherlands) and Geographic Network Affiliates, Inc (GEO).
For more than 125 years, AT&T (NYSE "T") has been known for unparalleled quality and reliability in communications. Backed by the research and development capabilities of AT&T Labs, the company is a global leader in local, long distance, Internet and transaction-based voice and data services.
The Southeastern Universities Research Association (SURA) is a consortium of over 60 leading research institutions in the southern United States and the District of Columbia established in 1980 as a non-stock, nonprofit corporation. SURA serves as an entity through which colleges, universities, and other organizations may cooperate with one another, government and industry in acquiring, developing, and using laboratories and other research facilities and in furthering knowledge and the application of that knowledge in the physical, biological, and other natural sciences and engineering. SURA created and operated SURAnet, one of the earliest regional networks to interconnect research universities to the Internet in the late 1980’s. Today, SURA and its members are active participants in the development of the emerging national optical research infrastructure and continue a leadership role in networking and community-based advancements of academic and research tools.
|
