The Gigabit-to-the-Desktop (G2D) initiative is a collaborative effort involving a range of universities and industrial partners that include the University of Washington, Carnegie Mellon University, MIT, Stanford, Microsoft Research, and DARPA, under the leadership of Raj Reddy, Dean of the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon.
This consortium is engaged in aggressive anticipation of Internet2/NGI. We seek to create a "distributed computer science department," exploring the software that will be required to support highly interactive distance learning and collaboratories when this bandwidth is ubiquitous.
Since the days of ARPANET, the University of Washington has been a leader in regional networking. NorthWestNet, the NSF regional network serving the 6-state Pacific Northwest region, is a creature of the University of Washington, and the NWNet Network Operations Center is operated by UW Computing & Communications under contract to NWNet.
Recently, the University of Washington has been a leader in the Internet2 / Next Generation Internet initiative. We have established UW as a Regional Partner of the National Computational Science Alliance, and we have assembled an Internet2 coalition including UW, Boeing, Microsoft research, and several adjoining states, in an effort to create momentum sufficient to ensure the siting of a gigapop (gigabit point-of-presence) in Seattle.
In undertaking the Gigabit-to-the-Desktop initiative, our goal is to remain one step ahead of the availability of bandwidth, gaining experience with tomorrow's applications today. We also will work to increase bandwidth to the region.
Under the umbrella of the Gigabit-to-the-Desktop Initiative, we hope to: