The move to join Internet 2 will, according to administrators and faculty members, improve and increase the scope of research activities and keep UB a "player at the table" with the top universities in the country.

Internet 2, officially called the University Corporation for Applications in Internet Development, is the new network being developed by a consortium of 112 universities to support research activities and other data and voice-communication needs that cannot be handled by the commercial Internet, says Hinrich Martens, associate vice president for computing and information technology.

"The Internet today is slow, it's bogged down, there's too much traffic and it can't handle all that's going on," says Jerry Bucklaew, network engineer. "If you want to do interactive things or live things, voice or videoconferencing, in real-time, you need greater bandwidth and quality of service"-guaranteed access to connection capacity that will guarantee sole use of the network link.

"Today's Internet is a lot like a highway, and when it becomes congested, it's slow for everybody," adds Tom Furlani, research assistant professor of chemistry and applications team leader. "The new Internet 2 is going to guarantee lanes between points A and B," like commuter lanes on a highway, he says.

Internet 2 is part of what UB must do to "retain and maintain the viability of the university," says Martens.

"We believe we will have applications and research projects that we wouldn't be able to carry out without the capability of Internet 2," he says. "We need it in order to maintain our competitive position to attract faculty, to attract research and to be a 'name' institution that will also be attractive to undergraduate students."

Voldemar Innus, senior associate vice president for university services who oversees UB's IT initiatives, agrees that by joining the Internet 2 consortium, UB has shown "that we are with the leading institutions across the country in infrastructure development and support of technology.

"It (Internet 2) will immediately provide...a limited number of our most demanding users of the Internet access to that new capability." It also will allow UB "to begin planning its integration into the instructional and research missions of the university," he says.

At an annual cost of at least $500,000 a year, UB's membership in Internet 2 is "the most important strategic investment and commitment we've made in '97-98, IT-wise," Innus says.

The universities involved in Internet 2 "are essentially the players in computer science and communication networking," notes Stuart Shapiro, professor and chair of the Department of Computer Science. "Not being there (in Internet 2) is being in the boondocks of universities."

Receipt of the NSF grant will allow UB to hook into the VBNs, the very-high-speed backbone network service that ties together the supercomputing sites at such universities as Cornell, Pittsburgh and Illinois, Martens says. UB will receive the money as its share of a maximum $1.75 million grant from the NSF to five core members of NYSERNet, a not-for-profit organization of New York research and educational institutions created in 1985 to advance the use of cutting-edge networking technology to support research and education.

The grant would aid NYSERNet in its NYSERNet 2000 Project, a partnership with the state to build a high-performance network infrastructure that parallels the New York State Thruway and provides connectivity to the VBNs from New York City to Buffalo, Martens says, noting that travelers along the Thruway will notice huge spools of multicolored cables that are being used to build the network.

The VBNs is the glue that ties everything together, "the way to connect the states together into one network," says Bucklaew, UB's engineering representative to NYSERNet.

Martens adds that of the 112 universities that are members of Internet 2, 80-85 will be connected to the VBNs after the current round of NSF funding.

In order to qualify for connection to the VBNs, applicants have to be classified as either R-1 or R-2 institutions-UB is an R-1 top-level research institution-and provide information to justify the connection, such as collaborations with other universities that require high-speed communication on dedicated bandwidths, Martens says.

Among the projects cited in the NYSERNet application for NSF funding is a proposal by the National Center for Earthquake Engineering Research at UB in which researchers at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas would remotely control UB's shaking table via "real-time data and video links," says Furlani.

Other UB centers or units with projects cited in the application are the Center for Stochastic Molecular Kinetics; the Department of Computer Science, working with the Hauptmann-Woodward Medical Research Institute; the UB site of the National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis; the Center for High Performance Computing, and the Center of Excellence for Document Analysis and Recognition (CEDAR).