Internet 2 International Task Force Meeting

Washington, D.C.,  March 27, 2000

Attended by Charles Granieri.

This was a one day meeting of the Internet2 International Task Force, which is made up of representatives of each of the Internet2 International Partner Networks.  The meeting was primarily a series of presentations, with a small amount of general discussion after each presentation.

I gave a presentation about the PingER network monitoring project entitled: International Network Connectivity and Performance, The Challenge from High Energy Physics.  This presentation showed the extensive international networking needs of the world-wide High Energy Physics collaborations and made a request to members of the Internet 2 International Task Force to help us meet these needs.  It also included several slides showing current HEP network utilization to and form most of the countries of the world.

Maxine Brown of STAR-TAP, the international research network access point near Chicago, spoke about a plan to make a distributed STAR-TAP with connections on both the East and West coasts of North America.  An international research network could then connect at one of these distributed STAR-TAP access points (possibly New York, Miami, Los Angeles, Vancouver, etc) and its packets would be transmitted  to another international research network connected at another distributed STAR-TAP access point by either the ABILENE or CANARIE network.   This is still in the planning stage, but it is hoped to have such connectivity between New York and Chicago in the near future.  Some networks with connections at Chicago already said that they would not change to another site until they upgraded in 1-2 years because of the cost of duplicating links and equipment at the new site.   STAR-TAP has recently been funded until 2003. 

Greg Wood, Communications Director of Internet2, gave an overview of some of the applications recently added to the Internet2 Application web pages.

George Brett of NLANR spoke about the NLANR distributed applications database.  There are currently 890 projects listed. 

Mary Kratz of Internet2 spoke about the Internet2 Health Sciences Initiatives.   She outlined the needs of the health sciences for high speed network connectivity.    In principle her talk was very similar to mine, but she did not present any network monitoring data between health science institutes.

Hunt Williams of Community of Science described the services offered by his company to the scientific community.  Basically his company offers a database service where scientists can put information about themselves and search for other scientists doing similar work.  He said that they currently have 500,000 scientists and 235 US and Canadian universities (including Stanford) enrolled.  They are expanding to other countries.