Remote access to instruments. Because of the speed and high bandwidth, or capacity to process vast amounts of information, Internet2 will allow college students to directly access things like powerful electron microscopes at elite research facilities or to take atmospheric readings from the Arctic. At the University of Delaware is a device known as the Bruker Biflex III mass spectrometer, used for molecular and cellular bioscience research. They mail in samples to the university and then, via Internet2, can actually control the device, no matter where they are in the country. Out at Stanford University School of Medicine in California, Internet2 is allowing 3-D surgical learning.
Students use touch-sensitive devices to learn dissection and surgical procedures.
Right now, they do it all on computer models. But actually using the Internet2 and those touch-sensitive controls to perform real surgery on real patients is not a pipe dream, says Van Houweling. Internet2 will make it easy to run super-computers from anywhere in the world, hooking them up in tandem, doing calculations and analysis on vast amounts of information in seconds that would take weeks with today's current systems. Van Houweling admits that data mining may not sound very sexy to the public. Kan. Only the beginning Internet2 began in 1996, just as the first-generation Internet was beginning to capture the public's imagination.