CUNY has joined a research consortium of top New York universities to plan the building of a high-performance networking infrastructure in the State. A proposal to fund the first phase of the project was coordinated by NYSERNet (New York State Research and Education Network) and submitted to the National Science Foundation in July. In addition to CUNY, anticipating institutions include Columbia, Cornell and New York Universities, Polytechnic University of New York, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, SUNY Buffalo and the University of Rochester. NSF is expected to announce award recipients in the late fall.

The New York State initiative, entitled NYSERNet 2000, shares many goals with Internet 2 (the national high performance network initiative). The State program aims to:

• identify New York-based research and educational initiatives that would be advanced by access to a network with high bandwidth, low latency and a quality of service guarantee;

• speed the development of advanced network applications by facilitating collaboration among NYSERNet members internally, as well as among them and their national and international peers;

• design and build a regional network infrastructure that incorporates the requirements of member institutions and those of Internet 2;

• provide low cost, advanced network capabilities to NYSERNet member institutions through economies of scale and resources available through grant agencies and corporate partners;

• quickly transfer advanced network capabilities from research to commercial environments; and

• establish broad based technical and financial support for this initiative with an aggressive plan to advance state-of-the-art network applications and services.

CUNYNet, already a mature and stable network with major upgrade plans underway, could make CUNY an attractive recipient of NSF funding.

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