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 a DS-3 connection from the main campus at College Station to the university's Institute of Biosciences and Technology in the Texas Medical Center in Houston, and an OC-3 ATM connection from there to the vBNS. Applications include the Advanced Research and Industry Enterprise Study (ARIES), comprising projects in telemedicine, visualization, computational chemistry and structural biology, meteorology, digital libraries, distance learning and teleconferencing; long distance collaboration with the National Library of Medicine and the Smithsonian Institution; collaborative projects in teleradiology with other institutions at the Texas Medical Center; and the Partners in Computational Sciences (PICS) project for modelling groundwater remediation strategies in conjunction with Brookhaven National Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, University of Texas at Austin, SUNY at Stony Brook, University of South Carolina and Princeton University.