The gigabit testbeds are being used to show the benefits a national gigabit network would bring to the scientific and engineering community and enable new technology like distributed supercomputing and data visualization.
Research includes multicasting, compression, and protocols.
This project is also investigating the interoperability of different ATM switches and networks, both local area and long distance. The research includes the study of signaling protocols, switch communication schemes, call set-up, and the design of switch controllers. The infrastructure evolves through the five-year project plan from simple subnetworks for parallel processing and storage, ATM studies, and collaborative multimedia computing to a hierarchy of ATM networks with different communication bandwidths and a variety of digital media services. This project is studying new high-bandwidth networking technologies based on GaAs integrated electronic and optical components. Various key network components are being built to evaluate the approach.