"The NGI program assures continuing U.S. technological leadership in developing new ways to communicate and collaborate."

Bessie Whitaker
NASA

A meteorological satellite collects data for producing actual and predictive images of activity over large areas.

NASA Research and Education Network hits the highway

By Tom Mead

"NASA is a mission agency; our work is to move beyond theory to produce technologies that are the actual working tools of the future," said Richard desJardins, networking consultant, NASA Research and Education Network (NREN). "We develop technologies that propel progress and benefit people."

During March 11—13, 1998, the NREN team participated in a series of Next Generation Internet (NGI) application demonstrations at the Highway 1 facility on Pennsylvania Avenue near Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C.

Highway 1 was established by computer manufacturers and telecommunications companies as a permanent home for technology demonstrations for members of Congress. The audience for the 1998 NGI demonstration included members of Congress and staff interested in understanding the nature and scope of the NGI program initiative. It is the first year NGI agencies set up coordinated demonstrations at Highway 1.

"The Highway 1 demos let High-Performance Computing and Communications demonstrate exciting applications that can be conducted only on high-performance networks," notes William Likens, deputy program manager. "The event helps Congress understand the work done by HPCC in pursuit of two NGI goals: to promote experimentation with the next generation of networking technologies; and to demonstrate new applications that meet important national and agency goals."

NREN is a small-scale version and testbed for what will be the technologies of the Next Generation Internet. Therefore, progress of the NGI program is linked to the progress of NREN. Several years ago the NASA Science Internet could transfer data at just 300 Kbps (300,000 bits per second) end-to-end speed. Now the benchmark end-to-end user speed in support of applications is 30 Mbps (3 million bits per second).

NREN technologies such as those presented at the March demonstration showcased two new NGI applications and networking functionality: Distributed Image SpreadSheet (DISS) and Remote Echocardiography.

DesJardins described one real-world example of how DISS would be used: "If several satellites have been imaging a developing hurricane through different instruments such as a rain sensor, a wind-field instrument, an imager and a heat sensor, the mountain of data that constitutes these huge images could be gathered from several archive locations and merged in real-time on a supercomputer. Combining these images in various ways provides a powerful tool to track, analyze and predict hurricanes, thus providing warning that could save thousands of lives. Standing alone, the individual images probably would not be able to generate that kind of warning. Without high-performance networking this kind of analysis would not be possible."

The other application demonstrated by NASA was Remote Echocardiography. Physicians at Highway 1 saw real-time echocardiographs from the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio. The medical data-images were transmitted across NREN links to Highway 1, but could have been sent anywhere on the network. "The rubber of this technology is much closer to hitting the road," said desJardins. "The Highway 1 event demonstrates the networking state-of-the-art, but the basic imaging technology is already in relatively routine use on proprietary high-performance medical networks such as that used by the National Institutes of Health."

The Highway 1 demo showed that NGI will provide both increased bandwidth and enhanced technological capabilities that require new network management capabilities. NASA is looking closely at two of those new capabilities: quality of service (QoS) and multicasting.

QoS refers to the practice of tagging different data streams with dissimilar levels of priority, even though they are flowing over the same network. On the NGI, users may be able to choose, and pay greater or lesser fees, for higher or lower priority in the data stream. Such selectivity is not an option on the public Internet today, although it can be found within proprietary intranets.

Multicasting is a technology for sending the same message to many sites without sending it many times. Sending a single message from A to B and then sending the same message from A to C is single casting. Sending a message from A to B and then from B to C is an example of multicasting. This offers the advantage of sending as few copies of the message as possible to reduce the cost of long-distance transmissions.

Bessie Whitaker, NREN deputy project manager said, "The NGI program assures continuing U.S. technological leadership in the evolution of the worldwide Internet. These NGI-developed technologies will help change the performance of today's Internet tremendously. It will provide new ways for people and businesses to communicate and dramatically lower the costs of videoconferencing, telecommuting, providing government services to citizens, collaborating remotely and doing business worldwide."

Such are the "actual working tools of the future" created by agencies—and people—with a mission.