Data 'superhighway' redefines speed

Businessmen and women can all move to Idaho, thanks to the Aurora Project, a new high-speed computer network created in part by two University professors. People will no longer have to "spend their lives in jets" travelling all over the world to access information, Engineering Professor David Farber said. With the Aurora Project's network, people can receive data any "place they want to live," even, Farber suggested, in Idaho. The project is a testbed for a data superhighway that enables massive quantities of information, including digitalized visual images, to be transmitted to distant locations at lightning speed. University and Massachusetts Institute for Technology professors and graduate students are working with IBM, Bellcore and the National Science Fund on the project. The project's biggest accomplishment so far took place in May, when 2.4 billion bits of information were sent at a record pace of one second from the University to a computer at a Bellcore Laboratory in Morrisville, N.J. But, Farber said, the project is not a breakthrough for science alone. "It is a spectacular, rare collaboration between universities, government and industry," he said. Speed is not the project's only asset. According to Assistant Computer Science Professor Jonathan Smith, there will be life-saving uses for this "information superhighway." For example, people living in rural areas would not have to travel for hours in an ambulance to take advantage of the expertise of specialists in bigger cities. With the speedy system, a scan of a patient made in a hospital in a remote location could be sent to a specialist for diagnosis in a big city like Pittsburgh or Philadelphia, Smith said. The Clinton administration and the Defense Department will also be using the technology. Farber said he is not certain what the future of the network will hold. "There are a lot of uses for a high-speed network," Farber said. "What we're doing is creating a field of dreams and inviting people to come and play."