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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.
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Albert Gore, Jr
U.S. Senate
Tennessee