January 23, 2001 Volume 2, No. 3 1. News from Rick 2. Research Update: Collaboratories 3. Member News: Bonnie Neas, Chair 4. April Member Meeting 5. Hot Links & NetWord of the Week News from Rick  One of the major goals of a gigapop (see NetWord of the week) is to offer advanced network services. It is one of the things that distinquishes the gigapops from common Internet Service Providers (ISPs). The advanced services provided by GPN include multicast, IPv6, and QoS. Multicast is more or less a broadcast service on a network. For example, suppose two people were watching a NASA launch across the network from the same office. In a normal unicast network, that would require two data streams to the two desktops involved. In the multicast world, only one stream is sent out and both desktops listen to that stream. At the last GPN board meeting, one of the decisions was to encourage all connections in GPN to be multicast enabled. We are now well along in that process, including multicast out to the Missouri and Kansas state networks, and all but a very few of the I2 schools have multicast enabled connections. We expect, in the very near future, to be completely multicast enabled. --Rick Summerhill, Executive Director, GPN Top Research Update: Collaboratories  From the EMSL Collaboratory Home Page: Scientific Collaboratories are designed to enable close ties between scientists in a given research area, to promote collaborations involving scientists in diverse areas, to accelerate the development and dissemination of basic knowledge, and to minimize the time-lag between discovery and application. The Collaboratory concept of an enabling collaborative environment can be applied to diverse areas including: experimental and computational research in the biological and physical sciences education clinical medicine and medical information systems computer and information sciences distributed rapid response teams collaborations in the humanities. Learn more about collaboratories and available tools. --Thanks to Dan VanBelleghem for this information! Top

Member News: Bonnie Neas, GPN Board Chair Bonnie Neas, North Dakota State University and Chair of the The Great Plains Network Board of Directors, was recently named to the newly created position of Assistant Vice President for Federal Government Relations and Director of Internet Research at North Dakota State University. She will be responsible for identifying and coordinating opportunities for NDSU's research community through federal government programs and will be active in the development of the University's Research and Technology Park. She will also continue to participate in programs such as The Great Plains Network, Internet2 and Educause to support Internet-enabled research for her campus, university system and State. Top April Member Meeting: Theme and Registration  Register now for the April 19-20 GPN Member Meeting. The working title for the meeting is Networking Tools and Resources for Collaboration and the meeting will be held at the University of Missouri, Kansas City campus. Panels are being developed as you read this on technical advances in networking, advanced networking tools for collaboration, collaboration science, video conferencing for collaboration, and much more. Each session chair is responsible for assembling her/his panel of speakers. Although the conference hotel has not yet been designated, you may register for the meeting at The GPN Meeting Registration Cafe and you will be notified by email when hotel information is available. Top Hot Links  EMSL Collaboratory Home Page The GPN Meeting Registration Cafe Internet2 Glossary of Networking Terms NetWord of the Week gigaPoP -- regional network aggregation points being formed by Internet2 universities to connect to a variety of high-performance and other types of networks. gigaPoPs provide scalable high-speed connection point. The Great Plains Network is a gigaPoP. NetThought of the Week Why call something a page when you can call it a cafe? To include your research/network/community news, contact the Editor. Top

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