The University of Washington has had a profound impact on the development of the Internet as we know it. As the hub of the Northwest Net, a role assigned it by the National Science Foundation back when the Net was known as NSFNet, the university has been a nerve center of both Internet intellect and industry. Breakthroughs such as IMAP, Pine, Webcrawler, MetaCrawler, and ShopBot have all come from the fruitful minds of UW (where the “W” could very well stand for Web). The “U-Dub”continues to play an integral role in the Internet’s advancement , including the introduction of Internet II (and Internet III!).
From its Computing and Communications offices as well as its Computer Science and Engineering Department, the U oversees a massive amount of Internet bandwidth. We sat down with Ron Johnson, Vice President of UW’s Computing and Communications area, for a conversation about how the Northwest Internet is dynamically changing and improving its capabilities for an entirely new generation of Net-based services.
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Seattle24x7: Ron, a lot of of people look at the Internet as a kind of static architecture, but the framework is constantly changing, becoming more and more powerful, not only in speed but in the sophistication of its other services. How have you seen it evolve as a network?
RJ: When you go from Internet I to Internet II (the “GigaPOP”), there’s a different arithmetic, from 45 million bits per second (the T-3), to 2.5 billion bits per second. The important thing, though, in delivering the next generation of Internet activities isn’t so much the speed. It’s the projects that relate to it. A key part of it is to guarantee end-to-end performance. Even if it’s slow, what you need to do is to provide predictable throughput for applications like voice, video, device control, instrument control, etc.
Seattle24x7: So rather than slow or missing information, there’s a consistent, reliable quality of service ?
RJ: What we want is for the application to tell the user the story. It may be “Sorry, but this particular application or device isn’t going to work particularly well. Would you like us to ratchet it back down to an MP3 or Real or Windows Media Player?” for example.
Another case might be in telemedicine. Say, radiology where there’s actually a standard of resolution for an X-ray. If you drop below that standard in a telemedicine application, you’d like to tell the physician that you’ve done that, or simply refuse to show it. So what you need is network-aware applications that know how to deal with content delivery and application delivery. These are all projects in Internet II.
Seattle24x7: Are there projects underway that will aid E-commerce?
RJ: Another class of projects is in tele-immersion. In fact, the region’s first video wall is over in Sieg Hall (the computer science building on the UW campus).
And there are major advances in public key infrastructure (PKI ). PKI is basically surrounded by a set of middleware applications. Some of them relate to different levels of service that networks need to provide. For example, if you have interactive video capability, you want to be able to authenticate who is on the line so that child molesters are not doing interactive video with kids at school — you want to know who you’re talking to and why. By the same token, you want authentication — where somebody’s authenticated to something, you want that trust fabric to work across the network.
Seattle24x7: Internet II is also dripping with multimedia power?
RJ: We set the land speed record with Microsoft Research a year or so ago — doing billion-bit-per-second flow in transmitting HDTV across the country. People were seeing five movie quality films on a plasma display in front of them. When you tell them the Internet is delivering that, they don’t believe it. Everybody still thinks of the flickering little image on the PC screen, when in fact what you can do is deliver feature film in real time in full resolution to a venue. And you can do that in operating theaters and hospitals, all kinds of other cool things.
Seattle24x7: That kind of transmission sounds almost too good to be true.
RJ: This is not your father’s Internet by any means — but you don’t really know that until you see it. For instance, HDTV looks pretty impressive in its compressed form, but when you get up to the uncompressed form, it looks like film—it’s cinematic. For demonstration purposes, we used special HDTV projectors to show it during a meeting in a theater context. The other thing we did was what we believe was the first live musical collaboration on the Net, that is people playing together at a distance. We had a violinist playing here in Seattle and a violinist in Oklahoma playing a duet together in real time.
Seattle24x7: Until speed like that is readily available, how can companies increase their performance?
RJ: There are two or three approaches that people use to make network delivery more predictable. One of them is based on our GigaPOP-SNNAP architecture. Part of the Giga-pop is something called the Seattle Network to Network Access Point which allows high speed, low latency and cost free, indeed cost saving exchange of local traffic.
Basically, the model is creating a situation in which by controlling the ends and the middle, and keeping extraneous paths from being used, you can determine what happens. And for local traffic, you can reduce latency by not sending traffic away that ought to be exchanged here. So you can reduce the number of hops and the extraneous motion of packets and save money.
A second approach is one that Akamai and others use — elegant mathematical solutions for moving content to servers that are staged in metro areas where the content is being consumed. A third approach consists of the various permuations of ‘backbone’ and co-located server space. These are workarounds and are often intermingled to meet requirements. Some of them just make fundamentally good sense from a network management & design standpoint, even with forthcoming increases in bandwidth.
Seattle24x7: What capabilities for high-bandwidth delivery are ready today?
RJ: Paul Allen’s got a startup called Digeo working on those technologies. If you look at the AT&T fiber and all those poles throughout King County, almost all of it is capable of wave division multiplexing. Once you get away from the old TV style set-top box to the network router gateway device and change the logic to an Internet from a cable system, you can have an infinite number of high quality television channels in HDTV and everything else available. You can deliver hundreds or million of bits per seconds to people’s houses. There are similar projects for different kinds of wireless. Terabeam broke the billion-bits per second wireless barrier right here on Capitol Hill.
Seattle24x7: Given our area’s leadership role in Internet technology and high-speed delivery, it’s surprising that Boeing, who is rapidly moving into those service areas, is relocating their corporate management out of the market. In effect, they’re leaving the digital technology capitol.
RJ: They’re going to keep their skunk works and their research folks here. A lot of cool things come out of those black buildings in Bellevue.
If you look at Boeing’s list of projects, a lot of them are “Beltway-based,” which is to say that if you really want to do that high-end, next generation defense and satellite distribution stuff, you need to have much more influence in D.C. You want to be close to the beltway and the Texas delegation probably doesn’t hurt you if you’re trying to promote those high-margin technologies. The things they really need are instant access to policy-makers and a bigger delegation to push it through.
Seattle24x7: On deck after Internet II is Internet III?
RJ: It’s constantly evolving. NSFNet created the technology that was used to build a commodity Internet. It was the source of the technologies for doing that. Internet II is the source of the technologies for supplanting Internet I with the next generation Internet capability. And we’re already starting in part of the Internet II movement to work on the wave level switching — that will be Internet III where the technology is essentially intended for replacing the Internet as we know it.
Larry Sivitz is the Managing Editor of Seattle24x7.
====================================== University of Washington
Computing and Communications
240 Gerberding Hall
Seattle, Washington 98195-1208
Box 351208
Phone: 206-543-0070
Fax: 206-543-4641 (fax)
E-Mail: [email protected]
Staff: 500+
Bandwith Allocation: Three OC3s and one OC12 or Gigabit Ethernet connection. A large part of that bandwidth will be used by the statewide K-20 educational network.
For research connectivity, the primary link is an OC48 to Internet2, plus some lower speed links to federal R&D nets. At certain times, they have also had OC48 connectivity to various DARPA “Supernets” e.g. NTON and HSCC.
Company Spin-offs
Out of C&C: NorthWestNet (now part of Verio), InterNAP, ResearchChannel (a national 24×7 Satellite and CATV TV) & UWTV. ResearchChannel and UWTV are pioneeers in digital convergence and bringing broadband TV content in realtime to the Internet.
Out of CS&E (including faculty): Netbot (sold to Excite@Home), Metacrawler (to Go2Net), AdRelevance
