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The Information Superhighways of Tomorrow Albert Gore, Jr. (C) ACADEMIC COMPUTING Magazine U.S. Senate from November 1989 Volume 4 Number 3 Tennessee Reprinted by permission In the next decade, we'll face many great challenges -- from finding shelter for two million homeless men, women, and children to giving the next generation of Americans the best schools on earth. But there will be no greater economic challenge than the battle to ensure America's leadership in advanced computer technology. Supercomputers and networks to connect them are not just another modern convience. I believe they will soon prove to ge the steam engines of the Information Age. In the next century, American competitiveness will depend largely on how well we exploit our advantage in high performance computing. Super- computers are going to change the way America thinks and does business. In the next few years, supercomputers will enable us to design more efficent car engines and home appliances, forcast the weather more accurately and further in advance, test new kinds of molecules with miraculous medical potential, and enhance oil recovery. With high speed computer networks, a surgeon in Nashville can send a CAT-scan picture to a colleague at the Mayo Clinic and get a second opinion instantly. We'll even be able to use computers to design better chips. But supercomputers will never be able to do all these things in the future unless we increase access through high speed networks right away. Last year, I chaired the first major Senate hearing on the state of supercomputer technology and policy. The message of that hearing was overwhelmingly clear: If the United States is going to be a supercomputer superpower in the 1990's we had better start building a high capacity national research computer network today. Three years ago, I sponcered the Supercomputer Network Study Act to explore a fiber optic network to link the nation's supercomputers into one system. I introduced the bill on the 30th anniversary of the Interstate Highway System because I believe that high capacity fiber optic netowrks will be the information superhighways of tomorrow. I envision a national network linking academic researchers and industry, clustering research centers and businesses arund network interchanges, and using the nation's vast data banks as the building blocks for increasing industrial productivity and creating new products. My legislation, which was passed as part of the 1986 National Science Foundation authorization, led to a wide-ranging report on high performance and supercomputer networks by the Office of Science and Technology Policy. There are more than one hundred networks in the country, but coordination among them is limited. The OSTP report found that these superhighways of tomorrow were more like left-turn lanes at rush hour today -- low capacity, overloaded, and unable to keep up with demand. Anyone who has used one can attest to the difficulty of shifting from network to network to find the right data bank, supercomputer, or colleague. Dr. John Connolly from the University of Kentucky's Center for Computational Sciences testified at my hearing that computer users will be able to send high quality pictures and graphics through supercomputer networks, but that demand for capacity far exceeds supply. He said the nation may soon find itself in a "graphic jam". Obviously, we cannot afford to let American competitiveness die of frustration on the turnpike. We're making some progress. NSFNET, which links regional networks to the five national supercomputer centers, now transmits 1.5 megabits -- the equivalent of 50 pages of single spaced text per second. By next year, the NSF expects to be running this network 45 megabits, or an entire Sunday newspaper every second. The Office of Science and Technology Policy and the National Academy of Sciences have proposed a three-stage, multibillion-dollar program to boost data transmission speed on the national research network to 3 gigabits per second - 2,000 times the current speed -- over the next 15 years. In my legislation, I called for making the 3-gigabit network a top priority. The federal government is going to have to take the lead in making sure our high-performance computing needs are met. We cannot afford to be Complacement. Can we rely on the market system to provide this kind of infastructure? We certianly couldn't where the Interstate Highway System was concerned. Private industry benefited a great deal from the government's leadership and investment. If companies are not yet interested in building the networks we need, the federal government needs to get them interested. This year, in May, I introduced the National High-Preformance Computer Technology Act of 1989 which will accelerate the development of a national information infrastructure. We must promote networks, services, databases, and the common standards to develope a coherent national network. We must forge ahead with research and development into artificial intelligence, software, and hardware. And we must train our students to use and apply technology. We must also examine telecommunicatins regulations that may hinder the development of a network, and ease any unnecessary restrictions that may stand in the way. We manufacture 72 percent of the supercomputers in the world and we like to tell ourselves that we're "ahead". But the real benifits of super- computing don't come from making the machines. They come from using the machines. That is something our competitors understand. In France, for example, the Minitel network of small home computer terminals has become a national obsession. In Japan, the organization that targets key technologies came up with a list of top priority projects that include a ten billion bit per second fiber optic network. Another reason to begin developing a bigger, faster, national network is that our progress in other scientific fields is generating unprecedented amounts of data. For instance, the mission to Planet Earth, an immensely important project ot study the earth's environment from space, is going to provide more information about the planet than we can handle. The Magellan probe scheduled to depart for Venus later this year will send back a trillion bytes of data -- enough information to fill 25,000 hard disks, with more image data than has been collected by all previous planetary probes combined. America has made great strides in computer network technology and development in the recent years. But for all our progress, we are still just a few steps ahead of our competitors. When you're in high speed, high stakes competition with the Japenese, words of encouragement aren't good enough. Those who invent, build, perfect, and apply the supercomputers that are going to make the American economy more productive tomorrow deserve to know that the United States government is ready to go all out for them today. The Japenese have proved what a nation can accomplish with one powerful idea and boundless determination. Now, it's America's turn to do the same - - and after all, we were the ones who showed them how. Its up to us to renew the American spirit, and make sure that the American people are ready for the choice:to ride the bullet train of technological progress or shake our heads in wonder as we watch it whizzing by. Note: This article is based on remarks prepared for National Net `89. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Albert Gore, Jr U.S. Senate Tennessee