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Internet2 and Abilene, the high-speed academic and research networks we reported on in the Winter '99 issue of Computing News, have come a long way since January.
Among other recent developments, the number of institutions directly connected to Internet2 has grown significantly, network traffic--particularly at the UO--is up dramatically, and route views and traffic maps are published on the web in several locations.
There are now about two dozen institutions connected to Abilene (either connecting directly as an institution or via a regional Gigapop), including the University of Oregon. Besides the UO, other institutions connected to Abilene at this time include California-Berkeley, California-Davis, California-San Francisco, California-Santa Cruz, Kansas, Kansas State, Michigan, Michigan State, Nebraska, NASA Ames Research, NOAA, North Dakota State, Ohio State, Oklahoma, Oklahoma State, Oregon State, Purdue, South Dakota School of Mines and Technology, Stanford, Texas A&M, USGS EROS Data Center, and Washington.
Abilene now also has direct or indirect peering up with the vBNS, ESNet, ATT Government Markets (aka NREN/DREN) and Canarie. For a complete list of network prefixes accessible via Oregon's Abilene connection, see http://www.ogig.net/routes.html
Route Views at the UO's Advanced Network Technology Center, a service for network engineers, also now includes high performance route information at http://www.antc.uoregon.edu/route-views/
Finally, the vBNS (Federal Very High Speed Backbone Network Service) has published a snapshot of the routes it is seeing at http://www.vbns.net/route/
You can see current traffic on Oregon's Sacramento Abilene links at http://goop.uoregon.edu/mrtg/ogig/198.32.163.9.html While it has only been up a few weeks, the University of Oregon connection is already generating more Internet2 traffic than most other I2 sites (contrast our Abilene traffic with the vBNS traffic reports available at http://www.vbns.net/nettraf/default.html) To see traffic between nodes on the Abilene backbone (remember, we connect via Sacramento), you may want to take a look at http://hydra.uits.iu.edu/~abilene/traffic/abilene.html
The UO's web cache server, proxy.uoregon.edu, has begun sending selected traffic to the National Web Cache Hierarchy at NLANR in San Diego via Internet2. As Internet2 routing to San Diego improves later this spring, we will shift additional web cache traffic over to that link.
Abilene has begun deployment of IOS 12.0(3.3)S.0228 (Cisco's multicast-capable version of IOS for GSR's) on Abilene's Cisco core routers, software whose multicast support was implemented by Dave Meyer of the UO Advanced Network Technology Center/IETF Multicast Directorate. As deployment continues, Abilene customers will begin to be able to source and receive high bitrate multicast audio and video streams not otherwise supportable by commodity MBONE connections.
NLANR and Internet2 held a joint technical workshop at Las Cruces, New Mexico, March 7th-10th. You may review workshop presentations at http://www.ncne.nlanr.net/news/workshop/990307/agenda03_99.html
A number of institutions in New York State should shortly be connecting to Internet2 via Gemini 2000, Applied Theory/IXC Communication's high performance network. Connection of those schools is currently pending completion of NSF review and certification of Gemini 2000 as a high performance R&E network (a la the vBNS and Abilene). For more information. see http://www.ixc-comm.net/
In the Middle East, the Israeli Internet2 high performance network will shortly be connecting to both Europe and to the StarTap in Chicago. For more information, see http://www.machba.ac.il/stindex.html