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A new Internet service might make it easier for neurosurgeons to share brain-scan images across distances.
The project, being pioneered at Carolina, speeds up the downloading time of large documents by stationing six computer network servers across the country.
The servers store copies of World Wide Web pages housed at their original sites. When users with special software download the documents, they access copies stored at the server geographically nearest them instead of the original.
"The advantage of the system is that if you go to information that is much closer to you in the network, it's faster," said Bert Dempsey, a professor in the School of Information and Library Science. "It's also more efficient for the total network. If people access local servers, they're not dragging all that information over the entire network."
Dempsey, along with researchers at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, is heading the project, called the Internet2 Distributed Storage Infrastructure. Internet2 is a national effort to ease sharing of research information among universities via the Internet.
"There are some really neat application projects," he said. Many potential users will consider the web project's suitability for those applications at a conference at Carolina on March 4-5.
"The conference is to help the engineers like me who are building the infrastructure get together with people who actually have applications and to let them talk with us to help us understand their needs," Dempsey said.
Conference attendees include researchers
at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn., who have compiled a database of Magnetic Resonance Imaging scans.
"There is some utility in doctors using this as a type of library," Dempsey said. "The doctor would take the brain scan that he's done locally and look at this whole library and see where it fits.
"The problem they have is the size of their images. Each image is half a gigabyte in size; it's hard to transmit. What would be a better solution than to put out images on all of these remote servers?"
Representatives from Columbia Earthscape, an online earth science publication at Columbia University in New York, also are considering using the remote servers. The publication shares large amounts of data among geological researchers.
Researchers from the California Institute of Technology, Hewlett Packard Co. and Cern, the European laboratory where the Internet was invented, will consider using I2-DSI for the Giod project, a particle physics experiment.
"Particle physicists have very large databases gathered in experiments," Dempsey said. "They need a way to share that information to scientists that are literally spread all over the world. They see I2-DSI as a way that they could essentially share the information across the network and the globe."
The remote server nearest Chapel Hill is at MCNC. The Research Triangle Park-based company, formerly known as the Microelectronics Center of North Carolina, provides electronic information services for businesses, government and schools.
Four of the remaining servers are at: the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, USGS EROS Data Center in South Dakota, the University of Hawaii at Manoa and the University of Indiana at Indianapolis. The sixth site has not been identified.
"Researchers and educators increasingly require advanced networking capabilities to collaborate effectively," said Douglas E. Van Houweling in a Feb. 8 statement. Houweling is president and CEO of the University Corporation for Advanced Internet Development, leader of Internet2. "I2-DSI will be one of the key components that ensure these new capabilities will be available."
Additional sponsors include the N.C. Networking Initiative and the Digital Library Federation. IBM, an I2-DSI corporate partner, donated the servers.
The project's web site is at http://dsi.
internet2.edu Additional information can
be found at http://www.internet2.edu and http://ils.unc.edu/~bert
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