[Plug] $7.5mil Pegasus Net contract awarded to Drexel

["William H. Magill" <magill@isc.upenn.edu>]

The announcement was in Wednesday's Inquirer, summarized here...

DARPA awarded a 7.5 million contract to Drexel University as lead 
instution in the regional consortium.... Bell Atlantic, Lucent,
University of Pennsylvania, Princeton University, City College of New York,
MCP Hanemann University. 

Manager will be Stewart Personick, Director of Drexel's Center for
Telecommunications 

"Pegasus, which will involve about three dozen researchers will encompass
architecture, optical networking and applications."

========<Full text - copyright 1999 Philadelphia Newspapers Inc.>====

December 1, 1999

"Internet to get an upgrade _Pegasus, a local research project, will 
receive funding to help speed up the Next Generation Internet.

                Martha Woodall
                INQUIRER STAFF WRITER

"With online usage doubling every four months, the Internet could wind up 
becoming a victim of its own success, with network bottlenecks 
exacerbating the World Wide Wait.

Researchers from area universities, Bell Atlantic Corp., and Lucent 
Technologies Inc. have received a $7.5 million contract from the federal 
government to make sure that doesn't happen.

Drexel University, which will serve as lead institution in the regional 
consortium, is scheduled to announce the project today. The research 
project, named Pegasus after the winged horse of Greek mythology, is aimed 
at finding and developing new technologies that will ensure the Internet 
can support growing demand.

The project, funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency for 
two years, is one of several that the agency is backing to make sure that 
what the government has dubbed the Next Generation Internet is 1,000 times 
faster, more reliable, and able to  support more advanced applications 
than today's Internet.

In addition to Drexel, Bell and Lucent, the consortium includes 
researchers from the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton University, 
City College of New York, and MCP Hahnemann University.<p>
"The Next Generation Internet focuses on creating new technologies to 
build networks of the future," said Stewart Personick, director of 
Drexel's Center for Telecommunications and Information Networking, who 
will manage the Pegasus program.<p>
He said the federal government announced the Next Generation Internet 
initiative two years ago, shortly after 160 universities announced the 
Internet2 project. Internet2 is aimed at developing advanced networking 
capabilities at reasonable costs for research institutions. The federal 
government considers the two projects to be complementary and is 
supporting both.

Personick pointed out that the Defense agency that awarded the contract to 
Pegasus had funded the projects in networking technology and 
infrastructure in 1969 that led to the creation of the Internet.<p>
"The Internet really is a field of dreams," Personick said. 
"We built it, and they came."

He noted that both the World Wide Web and e-mail came along <i>after</i> 
the Internet was developed.

"We cannot move forward with the vision everyone has of the 
Information Age" without making vast improvements to the networking 
technology that supports it, Personick said.

Pegasus, which will involve about three dozen researchers, will encompass 
architecture, optical networking and applications. One team will explore 
such issues as whether the protocols now used to transmit data on the 
Internet can be extended to support 21st-century multimedia applications. 

Martin Zirngibl, director of optical networking research at Lucent, said 
his team would build and demonstrate a huge packet switch capable of 
processing 100 times more information per second than switches currently 
available.

"The Internet is growing very rapidly," he said. "What is 
not being grown is the capacity of the switches."

If Internet use continues to expand as expected, Zirngibl said major 
bottlenecks could develop soon without the improvements.

The Pegasus team tackling applications plans to develop a sophisticated 
virtual laboratory that will enable physicians and researchers at Penn and 
MCP Hahnemann to collaborate on medical research in hopes of reducing the 
time for medical breakthroughs.

"What determines the speed of innovation is how quickly ideas can 
move," Personick said, "the velocity of knowledge."

-- 
                ===<Tru64 UNIX-SIG Chair>===
                     www.tru64unix.org
T.T.F.N.
William H. Magill                          Senior Systems Administrator
Information Services and Computing (ISC)   University of Pennsylvania
Internet: magill@isc.upenn.edu             magill@acm.org
          magill@upenn.edu                 http://pobox.upenn.edu/~magill/

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