ack in the mid-1980s, a consortium
of educators, researchers and entrepreneurs from 15 major New York State
universities and corporations—including the University at Albany—recognized
the potential for a regional high-speed computer network to support research.
At that time, high-speed meant 56 kilobits per second. Today, that same
network is 11,000 times faster.
The result was the formation of a not-for-profit corporation to serve the remote networking needs of these organizations: NYSERNet. Since it began operating in August of 1987, NYSERNet has connected universities across the state with the Internet, created hundreds of jobs in New York and played an integral role in the creation of the Internet.
Timothy
Lance, chair of the University at Albany’s Department of Mathematics and
Statistics, is also president and chairman of the board of NYSERNet, whose
main offices are in Rensselaer Technology Park in Troy and in Syracuse.
Lance said the network has driven dramatic improvements in speed and use
with new approaches that have enabled collaboration and promoted technology
transfer for research and education.
“We seem at the threshold of another era...in which network capabilities support researchers and educators richly enough that their use of the network can drive its development,” he said. “But the faster, smarter networks we have deployed hold theoretical promise for putting in researchers’ hands live modeling of information from the heart of a thunderstorm or a (geological) fault line undergoing change. In theory, the network can enable remote interaction with, and visualization of, huge databases; help us understand the human genome; remotely participate in the arts.”
NYSERNet has spun off two for-profit companies: Performance Systems International Net (PSINet), a privately held commercial Internet services provider with network operations in Rensselaer Technology Park; and AppliedTheory Corp., which markets commercial Internet services and has offices in Syracuse and New York City. PSI is the larger and older of the two companies; AppliedTheory has about 500 employees and is still growing.
“The creation of high-technology jobs in New York State is exciting in and of itself, particularly since our success in doing so has also enabled us to accelerate and directly support use of advanced networks by the research and education community,” Lance said.
But what intrigues him even more is the potential of NYSERNet. He envisions the network bringing new kinds of interactive resources into the operating room, for example, or feeding massive amounts of the most current radar data to the University’s atmospheric scientists—in short, a network whose growth is driven by the needs of its users.
