about pacific northwest gigapop

Leadership and Experience

With the privatization of the Internet (and the end of the NSFNET program) in the 1990's, it became essential to establish a super high-speed advanced network services fabric to tackle the shortcomings inherent in the technologies of today's commercial Internet. And it was clear that as a matter of national priority we needed R&D programs and a testbed infrastructure to address the already well-known problems of future high-speed and advanced services networks. "Aggregation Gigapops," new "advanced services," and the very high-performance national network fabric, along with collaborative application and middleware development efforts are the industry's and the advanced Internet communities' strategy for addressing the challenges.

Key regional and national partners worked to establish such a major "aggregation gigapop" site for the Pacific Northwest in Seattle - an intersection point where the rich mix of partners in Oregon, Alaska, Washington and neighboring states could be brought to bear. The University of Washington was invited to host such an effort. As such, the PNWGP is essentially a descendent of the pioneering NSF-funded NorthWestNet, the regional network that brought the modern version of the Internet to the Pacific Northwest early enough (starting in 1989) to enable full regional participation and the development of highly advantageous market positions in the emergence of the commodity Internet.

At the working level the PNWGP has so far been designed and built largely by the University of Washington's Office of UW Technology group. The University of Washington has long been a leader in the deployment of Internet technologies in the Pacific Northwest including their successful role in bringing the Internet itself via ARPANET and then the NSFNET to organizations and businesses in the region. (The University of Washington was a founding member in 1986 of NorthWestNet, one of the nation's original nine NSF-funded ISPs, and the University served as its NOC and principal engineering resource). Each of these initiatives proved vital in the growth of the region's high technology industries, as well as to the innovation of wide ranging commercial applications.

Today, in addition to the PNWGP, the University of Washington is: the Internet NOC for, and a principal designer of, the WA Statewide K-20 Network; a major provider of advanced networking services in the medical community; and creator and host of the Pacific Wave International Peering Service, the area's original and highest performance n-way peering and exchange point.

Not only does the University of Washington boast of some of the nation's best network engineers, it is well represented on the boards and planning groups of Internet2 initiatives:

• Ron Johnson - Vice President and CTO, Office of UW Technology; UCAID Network Planning & Policy Council Member
• Ed Lazowska - Bill & Melinda Gates Chair, UW Computer Science & Engineering; UCAID Network Research Liaison Committee Member
• Terry Gray - Associate Vice President for University Technology Strategy
  and Chief Technology Architect, Office of UW Technology; UCAID End-to-End Performance Initiative (E2EPI) and Quality of Service (QoS) Work Group member; Co-PI on "Security at Wirespeed" project
• Sherrilynne Fuller - Director, UW Health Sciences Libraries and Information Center; Associate Dean University Libraries, Health Sciences Libraries; Professor, Medical Education and Biomedical Informatics, UW School of Medicine
• Jacqueline Brown - Assistant Vice President, Information Technology Partnerships, Office of UW Technology; Chair of the Quilt National Gigapop Project of UCAID
• Louis Fox - Associate Vice President, UW Learning & Scholarly Technologies; Research Associate Professor, UW Information School; Co-director of the Internet2 K20 Initiative, interim CEO of Washington Digital Learning Commons

Similarly, Amy Philipson (Assistant Vice President, Streaming Media, Video & TV Technologies, Office of UW Technology) and a number of colleagues serve as key members of the various Internet2 "Digital Video" efforts. They are also the organizers of the national ResearchTV initiative which demonstrated the first successful coast to coast, sustained, multiple MPEG2 on-demand video streams of better-than-broadcast quality TV programming.

But here the University of Washington and PNWGP are just the tip of the iceberg. Much more importantly, the region is filled with similar and complementary expertise that PNWGP partners will bring to the table and share. Through constituents' councils and open forums, the PNWGP will create a highly synergistic and thoroughly collaborative environment by bringing together a rich mix of participants and partners - be it the amazing expertise within Microsoft's Research Groups, the leading edge distributed operating systems group at OGI, the visualization experts at the Arctic Region Supercomputing Center, OSU's high-performance systems user interface efforts, or any of the other world class network technology and applications scientists, engineers, and technicians throughout the Pacific Northwest.

Bottom line: The PNWGP is built and managed to be the best high-performance and advanced services networking hub in the nation.