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By Jon Nalick
USC Chronicle
Joining a trailblazing effort to boost Internet connection speeds by 200 times, USC recently linked up with several major West Coast universities and research centers via next-generation fiber-optic lines that promise to revolutionize how data is transmitted.
Representatives from USC’s Advanced BioTelecommunications and BioInformatics Center (ABBC) participated in groundbreaking ceremonies at Caltech on Nov. 19 and discussed practical medical, collaborative and educational applications that the new system will make possible.
Joseph A. Bannister, associate director of the USC Information Services Institute, and John A. Silvester, vice provost for scholarly technology, also spoke at the groundbreaking ceremony, emphasizing the dramatic capability of the new network to link the Health Sciences Campus, the University Park Campus and the university’s facility on Santa Catalina Island. It will make possible a Next Generation Internet Health Sciences/Life Sciences Testbed aimed at delivering health care and education to partners worldwide.
Frederick George III, ABBC executive director, said that the groundbreaking was the “modern-day electronic equivalent of hammering in the golden spike that opened the transcontinental railroad in the 1880s” – an event that transformed communication and commerce in the U.S.
“With this powerful new Internet capability, we’ll be able to link our sciences staff through electronic ‘collaboratoriums’ and eliminate spending on brick-and-mortar centers,” said George.
George added that “collaboratoriums” are in many ways superior to such centers because researchers are far less limited by geography in the exchange of data and ideas. For example, using the new system, scientists at distant centers can access one another’s supercomputers and other resources as quickly as if they were in the same building.
The new network is an experimental academic system to be used by universities and national labs to refine and develop higher bandwidth technologies that can be applied in industry, health care and education.
The ABBC is now investigating ways to take advantage of the new system to spur the development of better telemedicine applications that were previously thought too difficult to implement because of network congestion, George said. Such applications include real-time transmission of patient data, video and diagnostic images.
Created by the federally funded National Transparent Optical Network (NTON) Consortium, the network will connect major research and educational centers from Seattle to San Diego. Participants include JPL, USC, Caltech, the San Diego Supercomputing Center, UC Santa Barbara and Boeing.
The $20-million system uses “wavelength division multiplexing” – essentially the transmission of multiple colors of light simultaneously through a single fiber optic cable – to cram additional data into the pipeline. Each additional color of light boosts the volume of data the cable can carry in the same way that adding new lanes to a freeway can increase the volume of traffic.
The “rainbow of colors employed by the NTON network will create a virtual academic, educational and economic pot of gold” for the university and its partners, and will ultimately help revolutionize the way Americans learn, work and interact on the Internet, said George.
In theory, the technology can accommodate a data throughput of 100 gigabytes per second – fast enough to transmit about 83 average-length novels in a second. At the same time, the new technology is expected to drastically reduce the cost of transmitting data. When fully developed and incorporated nationally, it is likely to make telemedicine and tele-education far more commonplace, George said.
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