Officials Establish High-Speed Link For Research Data

The Daily News
Feb 19, 2010
By TOM WILEMON

Russell Ingram is mapping out a way for information to zoom between research institutions.

Ingram, the president of the Memphis Coalition for Advanced Networking (MCAN), said this proprietary, high-speed link will enable data to travel 3,000 times faster than typical broadbands.

The new network should be online by the end of March. The Tennessee Department of Economic and Community Development is providing $3 million to MCAN and Oak Ridge National Laboratories to establish the statewide network.

Research involving genome sequencing, visual records, video applications and other data transfers can slow down existing networks.

Right now, this technology is being used to send large computational biology files from researcher to researcher, mapping the human genome and things of this nature, Ingram said.

Much of the fiber-optic infrastructure is already in place, but some new lines will have to be laid. MCAN will have a long-term lease that will give it proprietary rights to set up 10 gigabit per second connectivity as opposed to the six to eight megabits per second available in most homes.

Extraordinary project
MCAN is a an independent nonprofit organization founded in January 2009 by the University of Memphis, University of Tennessee Health Science Center, St. Jude Childrens Research Hospital and the Memphis Bioworks Foundation.

Ingram, who describes himself as a contract business development provider, was hired to get the network running.

Its the brainchild of several people, he said. I was approached by a group of local community leaders interested in getting this capacity for Memphis. They know that I do special projects. I do weird projects. Thats what I do.

Ingram formerly served as president of Lifesigns, when it was owned by Stryker Corp.

Doug Hurley, the chief information officer at the University of Memphis, is one of the networks visionaries. The network is vital for recruiting leading scientists to the Memphis area and securing research funding, Hurley said.

Two other key players are Clayton Naeve, the chief information officer at St. Jude, and Steve Bares, the president of Memphis Bioworks.

MCANs network will be one of about 30 regional optical networks nationwide, Ingram said.

Its more efficient in that we control the network, he said. We control the use policies. We control the maintenance of it. We will control when the network is being heavily used.

You know, at home when you can tell when everybody around you is using the Internet because your connection slows down? We wont have those problems because we control the network.

Bringing everyone together
The technology will ease distance obstacles in Tennessee, said Matt Kisber, commissioner of the Tennessee Department of Economic and Community Development.

Tennessee has remarkable assets in the areas of research, development and innovation spread across our state, Kisber said in a statement. This high-speed link connecting East and West Tennessee will allow the kind of collaboration essential to the creation of new discoveries, new companies and new jobs.

The fiber-optic lines are laid out along the Tennessee Valley Authority grid.

With MCAN, as with every networking application, theres going to be a lot of last-mile connectivity to be done, Ingram said. MCAN is providing last-mile connectivity from some existing fiber that runs between Oak Ridge over TVA fiber and it runs down into Mississippi.

We are building out a small sub-network off that larger TVA backbone  all the way from the TVA backbone, all the way to the end user at each of these individual institutions, he said. We will be able to build out service to other users quickly. We are in talks with several Memphis institutions who are interested in becoming members as well.

The MCAN initiative will also connect Memphis with other research communities nationwide over Internet2 infrastructure. St. Jude is already collaborating with Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis to decode the genomes of more than 600 childhood cancer patients.

Corporate partners in the MCAN initiative are XO Communications and Cisco Systems.

Longer-term, Ingram said he expects these high-speed applications to become available outside of the research loop.

I think, especially as video applications become more and more ubiquitous, the world will become far more bandwidth hungry as it already has, he said. We see that curve now. Almost no one uses dial-up anymore.