This two-year award to Wayne State University is made under the high performance connections portion of ANIR's "Connections to the Internet" announcement, NSF 96-64. Wayne State will connect its campus-wide ATM backbone network to the National Science Foundation's very high speed Backbone Network Service (vBNS) by establishing an OC-3c connection to MichNet, the statewide computer network operated by Merit Network, Inc. The connection at Wayne State University will complement the high performance connections that Merit is establishing with the help of NSF (NCR-9616938) at the University of Michigan and Michigan State University. Collectively these OC-3c connections will support special research requirements at Merit, Michigan State University, the University of Michigan, and Wayne State University. This NSF award provides partial support for the Wayne State component of Merit's OC-3 infrastructure, which is connected to the vBNS in Chicago. With this high performance connection, Wayne State will expand current research and collaboration with both academic institutions and federal laboratories. Wayne State's OC-3 connection will support research related to automatic parallelization environments for distributed high performance computing, a collaborative digital library, quantum chemical reaction dynamics, quantum molecular dynamics, and high energy physics. Each of these projects will benefit considerably from the increase in network bandwidth and performance, bringing substantial advances to research in these fields. In addition, a high performance connection at Wayne State will encourage other faculty to pursue research opportunities that require access to resources at other vBNS connected sites.
