GOVERNMENT

MOSCOW, RUSSIA -- NCSA and the Kurchatov Institute, top research institutions in the U.S. and Russia respectively, today announced they have selected Teleglobe (NYSE:BCE, TSE:BCE), the e-World Communications Company, to develop a 155 megabit per second (Mbps) high performance network connection that will give the two countries' scientific communities unprecedented access to each other and facilitate joint scientific and educational projects. The link, called FASTnet (For Advanced Science and Technology Network), is funded in part by a $2 million grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) to the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Russian support for the link is from the Russian Ministry of Industry, Science and Technology. FASTnet supports a strong alliance between NCSA, the Russian Research Center "Kurchatov Institute" in Moscow, the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Moscow-based Joint Supercomputer Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences and Teleglobe. The new FASTnet network will increase the bandwidth between the U.S. and Russia by orders of magnitude. FASTnet will facilitate communications through high quality video-conferencing that has never been possible on such a wide basis between the U.S. and Russian scientific communities. The network's capabilities will be put to use during the U.S.-Russian Science and Technology Dialog series of science and technology working groups in nine different scientific disciplines, scheduled to begin next month. Following these dialogs, the discussions will expand to a broader range of topics and disciplines. "FASTnet represents a new level of communication infrastructure between the U.S. and Russia and it introduces new possibilities for collaboration and cooperative work," said Dan Reed, director of NCSA and the National Computational Science Alliance. "The primary purpose of this network infrastructure is to enable scientists in both countries to explore new research opportunities in a variety of disciplines." Among those are joint responses to natural and man-made disasters, safeguards of nuclear material, better understanding of the human genome, joint exploration of space, distributed monitoring of seismic events, high energy physics collaborations and atmospheric and other environmental studies and simulations. "Research collaborations with Russia are important to the U.S. science and engineering community," said Aubrey Bush, director of the NSF Division for Advanced Networking and Research. "The FASTnet team of Greg Cole and Natasha Bulashova have done an excellent job of building the international partnerships that are making this advanced network a significant resource in both our countries." "Teleglobe has been an active participant in experiments involving the United States, Canadian, European and Asian research networks since 1994, when we first demonstrated transatlantic connectivity between the Canadian national research and education network and a meeting of telecommunications ministers in Belgium," said Teleglobe's Vice President of Data and Internet Greg Ewert. "We are honored to have a role in advancing scientific and educational communications between the United States and Russia." FASTnet represents one of approximately 20 programs and activities proposed by NCSA and the Kurchatov Institute that will bring together the U.S. and Russian scientific and education communities through advanced information infrastructures or grids. A grid links research teams or individuals to each other and a vast array of online resources, including computing systems, advanced applications, scientific instruments, visualization systems and multimedia services. By connecting Russia to the U.S. through the Chicago-based StarLight optical access point, for connectivity to other research and education networks, the FASTnet network will provide Russian scientists, educators and students direct connectivity to the common interconnection point for global research and education networks. The connectivity enables both collaboration and the development of new Internet technology including wavelength switching and other grid networks. These North American research and education networks include Abilene, vBNS, CANARIE and ESnet. FASTnet will serve as the networking foundation for two Russian grid projects planned jointly by NCSA and the Kurchatov Institute: Nauka-Grid, which will connect Russian scientific organizations across the country and link them to online resources; and CIV-Grid, a similar project that aims to link civilians. For more information, visit www.friends-partners.org/fastnet for the U.S. site or www.friends-partners.ru for the Russian site. The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent federal agency that supports fundamental research and education across all fields of science and engineering, with an annual budget of about $4.5 billion. NSF funds reach all 50 states, through grants to about 1,800 universities and institutions nationwide. Each year, NSF receives about 30,000 competitive requests for funding and makes about 10,000 new funding awards. For more information, visit www.nsf.gov The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is a leader in developing and deploying cutting-edge high-performance computing, networking and information technologies. NCSA is a partner in the TeraGrid project, a National Science Foundation initiative to build and deploy the world's largest, fastest, most comprehensive, distributed infrastructure for open scientific research. NCSA also leads the National Computational Science Alliance (Alliance), a partnership to prototype an advanced computational infrastructure for the 21st century that includes more than 50 academic, government and industry research partners. The NSF Partnerships for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (PACI) program funds the Alliance. In addition to the NSF, NCSA receives support from the state of Illinois, the University of Illinois, private sector partners and other federal agencies. For more information, visit www.ncsa.uiuc.edu The Russian Research Center "Kurchatov Institute" is a nationwide complex of research facilities based in Moscow. It is the country's first national research center and was established in 1991 by decree of the president of Russia. The Kurchatov Institute replaces the former I. V. Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy and now is under direct authority of the Russian government, reporting directly to Russia's prime minister. The Institute has played a leading role in the development of the Russian Internet and continues to lead development of scientific and academic networking across Russia, supporting specific goals of increased United States and Russian scientific cooperation and the advancement of communications and infrastructure to support it. Dr. Evgeny Velikhov, president of the Institute, is known for his research in plasma physics and controlled thermonuclear fusion. He has served as a top science adviser to all Soviet/Russian presidents since Leonid Brezhnev and continues this role today. Dr. Velikhov has been active for many years in various initiatives with Russian youth. He introduced Junior Achievement into Russia and will this year see the education of its two millionth child in the principles and practices of business management and the free market economy. For more information, visit www.kiae.ru and http://www.ja-russia.ru/. The Joint Supercomputer Center was established in 1999 as the primary computational sciences facility of the Russian Academy of Science. For more information, visit www.jscc.ru.