By Dennis McCarthy

Imagine transmitting all 20 million books in the New York Public Library to, say, Amsterdam, in a second. Impossible? At the moment, yes, but only because the books aren’t all digitized. Google is digitizing many of the library’s holdings, along with the holdings of other major libraries around the world, and expects to scan 32 million volumes within 10 years. When this work is finished, libraries can be beamed across continents at the speed of light, and our contact with the printed word will be forever changed. Move over, Gutenberg; make room for Google.

Or suppose you’re a surgeon performing a delicate operation in Chicago and you need the help of a specialist in Hong Kong. You can videoconference him in and have him talk you through the operation, just as if he were standing over your shoulder. Or better yet, he can perform the operation, manipulating levers robotically across the Pacific Ocean.

To Greg Cole, a research director in the University of Tennessee’s Joint Institute for Computational Sciences, none of these ideas sounds like the plot for a Star Trek movie.

The capability of transmitting a library of data already exists. Real-time videoconferencing with super-high-definition quality is also a reality, with imagery so clear you’d think the person on the far side of the globe was actually in the room with you. And while telesurgery is still in its infancy, it’s here to stay.

Cole is the creator and director of GLORIAD, a high-speed research network that could allow the transmission of an entire library or the performance of an operation over fiber optic cables.

GLORIAD—an acronym for Global Ring Network for Advanced Applications Development—is a fiber optic network directly connecting scientific and education communities in the United States with 10 partner nations and indirectly with almost every other nation in the world. Today, virtually every university in the United States, as well as every federal agency, is connected to the network.

When universities or federal agencies send huge files to sister organizations in partner nations, GLORIAD is the charioteer.

Origins

“GLORIAD started out in an early incarnation as an example of social networking between the United States and Russia,” Cole says. “The Cold War was over, and a Russian friend—Natasha Bulashova—and I wanted to explore use of the then-new Internet to help build communications and trust between our two countries.

“I’ve had a lifelong interest in Russia, ever since I was 10 and got a short-wave radio and listened to Radio Moscow,” Cole says. “As I got older I read Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and other great works of Russian literature. I’ve learned the language. Russia fascinates me.

“Natasha and I set up a website, a web-hosting service, e-mail listservers, and chat rooms, and called the project Friends and Partners. It was not a dating service, despite some humorous early misunderstandings. Its purpose was—and is—to promote better cultural awareness and understanding among participants and to provide an avenue for communication.”

Within two days of the project’s launch in 1994, Cole received over 360 e-mails—mostly offers of help—from around the world. And soon he had funding—from NATO, the U.S. Department of State, and Sun Microsystems—and a new center for the international program.

Friends and Partners started out as a hobby. Cole says he never intended it to become a job, but it grew so large that he didn’t have a choice.

KORRNET

“At about the time we started Friends and Partners, I also helped start a community network in east Tennessee, called KORRNET, which stands for Knoxville Oak Ridge Regional Network” Cole says. “This was back in the early days of the Internet and we were trying to help the community engage with the new technology. We hosted websites, provided public access and training, and created user accounts. The project grew into something much larger, however. It got people throughout the region talking with one another and cooperating on all kinds of activities that had nothing to do with KORRNET.

“When we realized the community networking aspects of the project, we thought similar networks could work in Russia, too,” Cole continues. “The Ford Foundation, the Eurasia Foundation, and other funders interested in democratic institution building in Russia gave us support. We started KORRNET-type projects—modified, of course, for Russian communities—in six Russian cities. Those networks are still running today.”

The Russian Connection

With these successes under way, Cole and Bulashova decided to build a high-performance network between Russia and the United States. At that time it took much too long to send files of any size between the countries. For instance, it could take all weekend to send a 50-megabyte file to Russia. There was no way to do a videoconference; you couldn’t make a telephone call through the Internet.

So Cole and his team submitted a $4-million proposal to the National Science Foundation to establish MIRnet, the first high-performance network between Russia and the United States. NSF funded the proposal, and the Russian Ministry of Science provided substantial support as well.

Before that time, there was no practical advanced Internet connection for research and education between the two countries. MIRnet allowed the major universities and science facilities in Russia and the United States to communicate with one another. The network was begun in 1998 and completed three years later.

“When we started out, we could transmit up to six megabits per second,” Cole says. “Upgrades in 2001 and 2002 brought the transmission up to 155 megabits per second.

“The initial route to Russia was across the Atlantic and through Stockholm. We realized that if we could get a network link across the Pacific to Hong Kong, we could increase access to existing cables elsewhere and, in effect, complete a ring around the world. We would also then have a high-speed research and education connection to China.

“There was a fiber optic cable between Russia and China that was essentially unused at the time, and we got the two countries to agree to interconnect across their border. GLORIAD, the first ring around the Earth for science and education, was launched at a ceremony in Beijing in 2004.”

GLORIAD Today

The new GLORIAD network continues to grow. Cole and his colleagues have partnership agreements, not only with Russia and China, but with Canada, Korea, the Netherlands, and the five Nordic countries—Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, and Iceland.

The partner nations fund the network. The National Science Foundation, which has already provided over $10 million, is the primary funder of the U.S. partnership. Each U.S. dollar invested in GLORIAD leverages about 15 non-U.S. dollars.

Cole’s most immediate goal now is to create a high-speed network from Hong Kong to Singapore to Mumbai to Cairo and back to Europe. GLORIAD can then provide improved research and education services between the United States and Southeast Asia and India and will have an exchange point for future U.S.-Africa network development.

Cole is also trying to establish an interdisciplinary research center, the Center for International Networking Initiatives, to further integrate GLORIAD and other networking projects into research and education programs at UT Knoxville.

Although GLORIAD has only 11 partner nations, it has nonetheless served almost every country in the world at one time or another. For political reasons, the network does not facilitate transmissions with Cuba, Iran, and a few other nations, but Cole hopes those barriers will eventually come down. He sees the network’s role as one of connecting people and building trust through open communications—not erecting walls to isolate us from one another.

In Brief

“If I had to sum up GLORIAD in 20 words,” Cole says, “I’d say it’s a community-networking project, using next-generation Internet capability, designed to tie scientists, educators, and students together in countries where we haven’t traditionally had strong science and education links.

“While GLORIAD is one of the most advanced cyber-infrastructure systems in the world, at its deep heart’s core, it’s about human networking—it’s about people talking with one another.

“That’s more than 20 words, isn’t it?”

Visit the GLORIAD web site

Tags: Computing • Data • Greg Cole • Networks