Mississippi State University is among nearly 100 universities in a charter group of institutions working to develop a next-generation Internet that will be at least 100 times as fast as today's system.
Mike Rackley, the university's director of systems and networks, was among a national group that met recently in San Francisco to discuss technical issues and make plans for the new system's development.
Internet II is expected to rely on participating universities and research agencies joining forces to build extremely high-speed regional networks. When operational, it will allow university faculty and researchers to develop totally new tools, much like the existing Internet spawned the World Wide Web.
Some institutions, including Mississippi State, already have made major investments in networking and others will do likewise to improve campus networking. So far, nearly 30 Southern institutions are participating in Internet II development, among them Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and Vanderbilt.
Mississippi State also is cooperating with five other universities--Louisiana State, Alabama, Kentucky, West Virginia and South Carolina--to create a high-speed, wide-area network connecting the six campuses.
The SEPSCOR (Southeastern Partnership to Share Computational Resources) research project will be an experimental network to be used as a test bed for network applications requiring the transmission of large volumes of data, especially supercomputer-based applications. Installation of the network has begun and it is expected to be operational within a few weeks.
Rackley said Internet and campus backbone upgrades recently completed at the university, as well as the SEPSCOR network, "are consistent with technologies envisioned for Internet II.
"We're on the way to creating the technological foundation that will carry us well into the next century," he added.