Technical Vision: Seamless Collaboration

Advancing technology has brought the world closer. This is especially apparent in the ever-expanding role of communications networks. These networks will continue to evolve, and their success will hinge, in part, on the development of seamless access to a variety of computational and information networks. The end users of the networks of tomorrow should become even less aware of the degree to which they are using one or another particular network. These networks will have various demands placed upon them. The researcher will demand higher performance with the capabilities of transmitting large amounts of data and interacting with remote applications with less and less latency. The educator will demand higher performance to engage a greater sharing of resources and more cooperation in education. The public will demand that its access to information and knowledge be expanded. The universities will be at the center of these demands and they will need to accommodate interactions with diverse groups. Research has become a collaborative endeavor with geographically distant research partners. Hence, the technical vision of this proposal is to create a research networking environment that appears seamless to researchers and in which they can communicate and interact with other researchers, educators, and the public in a manner that is effective and efficient.

This vision requires access to multiple high-performance networks. As the results (described below) of our first year of effort illustrate, this vision is being transformed into a reality that will provide access between collaborators for vital ongoing research, and position the University of Alabama in Huntsville’s as a technology and information broker.