CENTER FOR COMPUTATION & TECHNOLOGY

JACKSON - Mississippi's four largest universities have upgraded their Internet connections to enable them to significantly expand their research capabilities and access to information. They now have faster and broader routes to the information superhighway via two national research networks. Jackson State University, Mississippi State University, the University of Mississippi and the University of Southern Mississippi began using the new routes July 1. The upgrades come via the Internet2 Network and the National LambdaRail. The Mississippi universities are using the NLR for the first time as part of a collaboration with the Louisiana Optical Network Initiative. This gives the two states' research universities supercomputing power to link up with the national research networks. This will help college researchers whose projects require video on demand or access to large, remote sets of scientific data. “Mississippi State University is a national leader in high performance computing, and our connection to LONI will help foster research collaborations with our sister research institutions in Mississippi and with our national peers,” said Kirk H. Schulz, MSU vice president for research and economic development. “We anticipate that this will have a significant positive effect on our interdisciplinary research programs in engineering, materials science and biotechnology.” The four Mississippi universities shared in the one-time cost of establishing the physical network connections to LONI's point of presence, or POP, in Jackson. Installation of the new Internet2 Network backbone itself was completed in June. JSU connects directly to LONI's Jackson POP, while the other three universities are significantly upgrading their campus connections to Jackson with new AT&T Metro Ethernet circuits. This widening of the last leg to each campus allows six to 10 times more traffic to flow between each campus and the national networks, accommodating the growing demand for not only e-mail and Web browsing, but especially for data-intensive, network-based research applications. The installation of the new Metro Ethernet switches in Oxford and Starkville also creates opportunities for local companies wanting to connect to AT&T's Metro Ethernet service, which has been available in Hattiesburg for some time.