Appendix A: OSTP Proposals for a National Research Network
NETWORKING
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FINDING: The U.S. faces serious challenges in networking technology which could become a barrier to the advance and use of computing technology in science and engineering.
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Current network technology does not adequately support scientific collaboration or access to unique scientific resources. U.S. commercial and government sponsored networks presently are not coordinated, do not have sufficient capacity, do not interoperate effectively, and do not ensure privacy.
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Europe and Japan are aggressively moving ahead of the U.S. in a variety of networking areas with the support of concentrated government and industry research and implementation programs.
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Computer network technology provides the means to develop large scale distributed approaches to the collaborative solution of computational problems in science, engineering, and other applications areas. Today, researchers sharing a local area network are able to exploit nearly instantaneous communication and sharing of data, creating an effect of linking their workstations and high performance servers into a single large scale heterogeneous computing facility. This kind of capability is now appearing in larger scale campus-wide computer networks, enabling new forms of collaboration. National networks, on the other hand, have low capacity, are overloaded, and fail to interoperate successfully. These have been expanded to increase the number of users and connections but the performance of the underlying network technology has not kept pace with the increased demands. Therefore, the networks which in the 1970s had significant impact in enabling collaboration, are now barriers. Only the simplest capabilities, such as electronic mail and small file transfers, are now usable. Capacity, for example, is orders of magnitude less than the rates required, even if the network is used only for graphics.
Other countries have recognized the value of national computing networks, and, following the early U.S. lead, have developed and installed national networks using current technology. As a result, these countries are now much better prepared to exploit the new opportunities provided by distributed collaborative computing than the U.S. is at the present time. The basic technologies for later generations are also being developed in the U.S., but there have been no major efforts to apply them to address the needs.
Applications include (1) distributed access to very large databases of scientific, engineering, and other data, (2) high bandwidth access to and linking among shared computational resources, (3) high bandwidth access to shared data generation resources, (4) high bandwidth access to shared data analysis resources, such as workstations supporting advanced visualization techniques.
