Nigel Allen <ndallen@contact.uucp> (04/21/91)
I saw the following message in comp.misc, and thought it might be of interest to TELECOM readers. "Today" in Raul Rockwell's message is April 18. From: cs450a03@uc780.umd.edu (Raul Rockwell) Newsgroups: comp.misc Subject: High Performance Computing Act (Nat'l Research & Education Net) Date: 18 Apr 91 19:20:49 GMT Organization: The University of Maryland University College I happened to notice that the House passed its version of the High Performance Computing Act today (H.R. 656, if I remember right). That's the beastie that would establish a multi-gigabit long-haul network (Nation Research and Education Network). This thing has been kicking around for several congresses, but this time it seemes to be flying through committees -- if I had to guess, I'd guess that it will become law sometime this year. Quick recap of the bill: (*) it directs a bunch of agencies to allow grant money to be spent on funding the network. (*) there are a batch of studies that are to be done, and Congress and the President are supposed to review some of these studies annually. (*) National Science Foundation is supposed to be connecting colleges, universities and libraries to the net. (*) DARPA does R&D for fiber optics, switches and protocols (*) NIST is supposed to adopt standards and guidelines (hopefully good ones). (*) NASA does research on high performace computing (mostly aeronautics, and remote sensing stuff). (*) supposedly, private industry is supposed to be kept in the action and there is stuff in there about user fees where practical. [I kinda hope this is more for high-volume activities that the new net would make possible, not "small" things like ftping to some college). Supposedly, the net is supposed to be in operation by 1996. The cost estimate is just a hair under two billion dollars. Raul Rockwell