This award is made under the high performance connections portion of NCRI's "Connections to the Internet" announcement, NSF 96-64. It provides partial support for two years for an OC-3 ATM connection to an existing OC-12 SONET ring which connects four sites in the Pittsburgh area to the Very High Performance Backbone Network Service (vBNS). The other sites are the Pittsburgh Supercomputer Center, Westinghouse Energy Center and Allegheny Hospital. Applications include Informedia: Digital Video Library and News on Demand; Automated Interactive Microscope; Earthquake Modelling; Virtualized Reality; National Medical Practice Knowledge Banks; and Networking Research. Collaborating institutions include University of Michigan, UC Santa Barbara, UC Berkeley, Stanford, University of Illinois, MIT, Cornell and University of Virginia.
