[CAnet - news] Museum of Natural History acquires dark fiber network and wavelengths

For more information on this item please visit the CANARIE CA*net 4 Optical
Internet program web site at http://www.canarie.ca/canet4/library/list.html
-------------------------------------------

[AMNH is a good example of advantage of dark fiber architecture for the
added redundancy and remote peering required for high bandwidth applications
-- BSA]


    	  	
http://www.nysernet.org/news/newsletters/vol1_no1_7.php		
	

American Museum of Natural History - http://www.amnh.org

Manhattan's American Museum of Natural History had the honor of being the
first independent Museum to join the Internet 2 community. As a research
institution with over 200 scientists, it represents a base of intellectual
activity that extends far beyond exhibits of poisonous frogs, historic
panoramas of animals in their natural habitats, or the most advanced
planetarium. Some of the 32 million objects in the permanent collection are
not just viewed by several million people a year, but studied intensely by
researchers around the globe.

Just a few years ago a single astrophysicist could occupy all of the
Museum's bandwidth for five or six hours a day. He was uploading scans of
the stars as slivers of the sky seen from Earth. The purpose was to compare
a set of photographic plates taken in the late 1950's and 60's with a new
set taken by the Hubble space telescope in the previous year or two. When
the Hubble images were aligned the patterns pretty much matched, reflecting
the constancy of the night sky. But discrepancies were what were sought, and
the computer program written to compare the two scans did not disappoint. In
a single year more "near Earth moving objects" were identified than in the
previous three centuries. Anything headed our way? Not much, but you can't
know until you can compare where each object was previously to where it is
now.

This project would have taken years to complete at the rate uploads were
coming in, to say nothing of the fact that practically everything else
coming and going over the Museum's network connection was impeded. After the
Museum acquired its Internet 2 connection scans of each slice of sky were
acquired in minutes instead of hours.

The Museum is one of the few places that shoots original short nature videos
on various subjects and distributes them for use by other museums and
educational institutions. A relatively unique aspect of this endeavor is the
fact that the video is shot in High Definition (HD) for displays and
exhibits. The clips are exported over Internet 2 to the National Center for
Supercomputing Applications in Chicago, and subsequently distributed to
subscribers from there.

Two future projects are expected to make heavy use of the Museum's network
connection. One is the upload of data collected by a NASA spacecraft
trailing a comet, one class of "near Earth moving object." Researchers
anticipate seeing terabytes of data every month. Another project requires
the remote control of a telescope in Chile by scientists at the Museum.
Enough information about telescope's view needs to be transmitted and
analyzed quickly so that the telescope's position can be adjusted during the
brief time the instrument is available.

Finally, the Museum is preparing for the future and the ever-increasing
demand that will be made of its web sites. There are enough photographic
images of objects in the collection to fill thousands of CD's - a quantity
of CD's so vast that handling them is too cumbersome. Then there are the
laser scans, X-rays, videos, and audio files. These can be accessed by the
public over the internet, but the ones required by researchers, people who
usually have Internet 2 access, are much larger. They contain details
required for research but not for browsing. The flood of information
traveling out of or into the Museum over its internet connections can only
be handled by Internet 2.

As a member of the New York Metro Fiber Consortium, the Museum enjoys very
high speed dual-path fiber connectivity to NYSERNet's peering facility in
downtown Manhattan where it connects to Internet 2. The Museum employs
coarse wave-division multiplexing to expand its fiber capability to eight 1
Gb/second waves, providing virtually unlimited capacity to share educational
and research oriented information so NYSERNet and Internet 2 are essential
elements in the Museum's ability to fulfill its mission today. Moreover, the
volume of traffic for both the Museum's research and education functions is
growing at exponential rates. With an optical ring to NYSERNet's statewide
optical infrastructure and the national and international peering point in
lower Manhattan, the Museum can keep pace with demand into the future,
merely swapping out optical equipment when it needs to move to the next
threshold of transport capability.

Dr. Francis C. Lees, Chief Information Officer of the American Museum of
Natural History, has been a member of the Board of Directors of NYSERNet
since its founding in 1985. He was CIO at the University at Albany then
(their first), later assuming that role at Rockefeller University before
coming to AMNH. An anthropologist by training, with his work at the Museum
he embodies the revolutionary changes in research in that discipline, and in
the host of other research and educational fields of the Museum.


-------------------------------------
To SUBSCRIBE:
send a blank e-mail message to
[email protected]

To UNSUBSCRIBE:
send a blank email message to
[email protected]
-------------------------------------

These news items and comments are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect
those  of the CANARIE board or management.
 
	 
		  		

-----------
[email protected]
www.canarie.ca/~bstarn
skype: pocketpro
SkypeIn: +1 614 441-9603


_______________________________________________
news mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.canarie.ca/mailman/listinfo/news