What would you do with a network 1,000 times faster than today's Internet? If you think like the government agencies assembled in Washington, DC, this week, you'd build big applications - really, really big applications.
Netamorphosis, an open-to-the-public fete of advanced technology related to the Clinton administration's Next Generation Internet initiative and other federal think-tank programs, opened its doors Wednesday for a three-day fest at Highway 1, Washington's infotech demonstration center.
The event is being put on by two parts of the White House - the Office of Science and Technology Policy and the National Economic Council, said Sally Howe of the National Coordination Office for Computing Information and Communications.
Netamorphosis will be putting some of the Next Generation Internet's applications on display. Among these are some that promise new "medical, environmental, national defense, and manufacturing applications."
It's not a dog-and-pony show - these are all working prototypes. And they all share one thing: They need lots of bandwidth.
Such is the requirement of the Visible Human Project, a digital image library of male and female anatomy available for download as 24-bit raw data.
"What is going to be demonstrated today is how NGI will make it possible to transmit medical information quicker and more reliably," said Kathy Gardner Cravedi of the National Institutes of Health, where the Visible Human was developed.
"It allows you to download the data that you would need to do three-dimensional reconstructions of any part of the body that you want," said Mike Ackerman, who dreamed up the Visible Human 12 years ago.
"The reason it makes it at NGI is that each of those cross sections are seven megabytes," he said. "For the male, there are over 1,800 cross sections because the resolution is a millimeter. We learned a lot with the male, so for the female we did a third of a millimeter resolution - she's 5,100 slices. He's 15 gigabytes, she's 40 gigabytes."
The demo will also show results of what researchers have done with this work, three-dimensional representations of parts of the body that can be rotated and viewed from various angles. Manipulating the data on the Internet today - even if you're well connected - would be a time-intensive process, Ackerman said. On the Next Generation Internet, the process is practically instantaneous.
Not to be confused with Internet2, the efforts of leading-edge US institutions to build new, advanced computer-network applications, the Next Generation Internet began on 1 October 1997 with the collaboration of several science-related government agencies, including the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and the National Science Foundation.
The two projects, which have similar goals, do cooperate. The Next Generation initiative aims to research new end-to-end networking technologies and "revolutionary applications" for the Net, operating under two high-speed network test beds that, when built, will connect at least 100 sites each. These networks will operate at speeds 100 to 1,000 times faster than the Internet proper.
One of the Next Generation demos, the National Institute of Standards and Technology's Octahedral Hexapod, is straight out of Buckminster Fuller: The spiderlike machine tool is capable of an incredible range of movement. The idea for hexapods, which can be employed for making highly refined precision devices, has been around for a long time. But it's only now, with the development of software needed to control the tool's movements, that the device is becoming practical.
What the Next Generation Internet offers is the ability for real-time collaboration among researchers who want to use the tool. "There are a lot of different universities and technical organizations that are collaborating and learning about (hexapods)," said Mark Bello of the standards institute. He said the Next Generation project offers researchers a "kind of experimental proving ground for collaborative and concurrent engineering. Once you have a remotely operated machine tool or capability, you develop a kind of electronically configured manufacturing collaboration."
In addition, the new network offers a higher level of security that helps prevent interlopers from seizing control of hexapods or other remotely controlled devices.
"When it comes to the actions of machine tools," Bello said. "You dont want enyone messing with your controller. "
Netamorphasis will feature 18 such demonstrations of advanced technology facilitated by the new network, from DARPA's "Informedia News-on-Demand" - which does "full content" searches on broadcast TV and radio news - to Cave5D, an environmental data visualization system for interactive virtual reality simulations of environments, such as the NSF-funded Chesapeake Bay Virtual Environment.
