TEXAS UNIVERSITIES EXPANDING NEW INFORMATION
NETWORK
UH Priorities in $9.8 Million Initiative Include
Collaboration, Sharing Infrastructures, Organizing
HOUSTON, Oct. 12, 2004 – The University of Houston is joining
a fast new research network in Texas that will make the ubiquitous
fact-finding capabilities of the Internet seem like wrestling with
microfiche.
Texas Gov. Rick Perry and Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst recently announced
the approval of $9.8 million in funding to build the high-speed
Lonestar Education And Research Network (LEARN) for Texas higher
education institutions, and to construct the Texas Internet Grid
for Research and Education (TIGRE) to enable these institutions
to access and share resources, collaborate on research, and facilitate
online teaching and remote learning. This initiative will help Texas
universities and industrial partners work together, as well as magnify
their capabilities and the impact of their collective research expertise,
as similar initiatives in many other states have done.
“This will not only enhance the opportunity for students
at Texas educational institutions to be part of the emerging world
of worldwide collaborations, but also allow them to participate
in leading-edge research using state, national and global resources
and information infrastructures that form the basis for a significant
and rapidly growing part of the economy,” said Lennart Johnsson,
Cullen Professor of Computer Science and Director of the Texas Learning
and Computation Center at the University of Houston. “In Houston,
we are already in the process of establishing a metropolitan high-speed
network connecting UH, Rice University and institutions in the Texas
Medical Center to the LEARN network and the National Lambda Rail.”
“The collaboration between the higher education institutions
in Houston and around the state has been phenomenal,” said
Chuck Shomper, chief information officer for the University of Houston,
chair of the South East Texas GigaPOP and a member of the LEARN
Board of Directors.
The LEARN consortium includes more than 30 universities and medical
research institutions in Texas, linking them at much higher speeds
than current networks to permit researchers to share very large
data sets, as well as collaborate in real time. TIGRE will use grid
computing software technologies to connect the Texas institutions
on LEARN, as well as enable each institution to share its own resources.
Computing, visualization, storage systems, data collections, databases,
large-scale scientific instruments and sensor networks will all
be available and linked by TIGRE over LEARN.
TIGRE access to the state’s rich set of distributed resources
will enable Texas researchers, educators and industrial partners
to address the most challenging and important problems in areas
such as biomedical research, environmental modeling, petroleum engineering
and computer science. TIGRE will be constructed during the course
of two years by five institutions in the High Performance Computing
Across Texas (HiPCAT) consortium of Rice University, Texas A&M
University, Texas Tech University, the University of Houston and
The University of Texas at Austin.
“This opportunity to provide state-of-the-art infrastructure
through information technology will enhance the collaborations worldwide
for research programs,” said Arthur Vailas, vice president
for research at UH. “This type of fast, comprehensive network
at our fingertips will certainly foster new affiliations and expand
upon existing joint partnerships internationally across industries
and within the academic and medical fields.”
About the University of Houston
The University of Houston, Texas’ premier metropolitan research
and teaching institution, is home to more than 40 research centers
and institutes and sponsors more than 300 partnerships with corporate,
civic and governmental entities. UH, the most diverse research university
in the country, stands at the forefront of education, research and
service with more than 35,000 students.
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For more information about UH visit the universitys Newsroom at www.uh.edu/admin/media/newsroom.
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