Contact:
Kay Kendall, Communications Chief
Texas A&M University's Institute of Biosciences & Technology
2121 W. Holcombe Blvd, Houston TX 77030-3303
Tel. 713-677-7736, Fax 713-677-7512
Email: [email protected]
WWW: http://keck.tamu.edu/
Texas A&M University and its Institute of Biosciences
and Technology join 34 other institutions receiving
grants from the National Science Foundation
for high speed computer network
connections, part of the foundation for the
Next Generation Internet (NGI) initiative.
Vice President Al Gore announced the
new grants Tuesday. Texas A&M will connect
to the NSF's Very High Speed Backbone
Network Service or vBNS through the
university's Institute of Biosciences and
Technology (IBT) in Houston. The vBNS is the
backbone of the government's Next
Generation Internet (NGI) effort and will help
develop an improved Internet for academic
uses.
The current Internet moves data at about
50 million bits per second. The vBNS will be
able to transmit up to 622 million bits per
second, meaning 30 volumes of the
Encyclopedia Britannica could be sent in
under a second. The addition of 35 new
schools brings the number of research
institutions on the backbone network to 64.
The NGI goal is 100.
Texas A&M hopes to provide enhanced
networking and telecommunications
opportunities with a wide-ranging number of
projects with the National Library of Medicine,
the Smithsonian Institution, the Advanced
Research and Industry Enterprise Study with
the American Petroleum Institute and foreign
researchers.
The $350,000 NSF grant will be matched
by nearly $400,000 in funds from the
university, primarily from the Offices of the
President and the Provost. Overall, about
$12.3 million in grants were awarded.
This new broad-band connectivity allows
researchers to develop new modes of
research and teaching and ways to explore
new means of interaction in areas such as
telemedicine and distance education.
The principal investigator is Dr. Leland
Ellis, professor of biochemistry and
biophysics and director of the IBT W.M. Keck
Center for Genome Informatics.
Co-principal investigators include Dr.
Pierce Cantrell, associate professor of
electrical engineering; Dr. Richard Ewing,
dean of the College of Science and director of
the Institute for Scientific Computation (ISC);
Dr. John Leggett, associate professor of
computer science and director of the Center
for the Study of Digital Libraries and Dr.
Michael Pilant, professor of mathematics,
aerospace engineering and computer science.
The ISC and the digital library center are
part of the Texas Engineering Experiment
Station, a state research agency and member
of the Texas A&M University System. The IBT
is located in the Texas Medical Center, the
world's largest medical center.
Gore said yesterday the grants are part of
a strategy to allow researchers to
push forward the frontiers of science in ways
we can only dream about. The announcement
and list of the institutions is at
http://library.whitehouse.gov/PressReleases.cgi?date=1&briefing=1.
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