FIU and its Florida-based cousins at UF, FSU and FIT will leverage their geographical proximity, participation in CMS and existing institutional relationships within the State of Florida by creating a special Florida Research Grid where joint Grid and networking activities could be run independently of national or international Grid efforts. For instance, the new statewide Grid will support experiments to develop and optimize new transport protocols for high-throughput communications that are critical for long-haul networks with data rates approaching 10 Gbps (10 Gigabits/sec), new mechanisms for guaranteed quality of service in end-to-end performance, and new services for scalable on-line monitoring and management. Activities will be initiated in a number of areas, e.g., simulations, research calculations, student projects, outreach team activities with each other and with our South American colleagues, and other projects within the State of Florida. We expect many serendipitous activities will be made possible by the existence of powerful, distributed statewide computing and networking resources.

Although the Florida universities and Caltech can network now through their Internet2 Abilene connections, there are benefits to creating a Florida advanced networking triangle that will provide UF and FSU direct connectivity to StarLight and UERJ through the requested circuits so the Florida Research Grid can be established. The circuit costs for the advanced network infrastructure are being sought in separate proposals to the State of Florida Centers for Excellence in information technology proposal and through other SURA-based initiatives.
Recent developments in California present a model for the Florida network, and ready partners in these developments. Plans are underway to put “last mile fiber” in place between the Caltech Center for Advanced Computing Research (CACR) and the CENIC and Abilene points of presence in downtown Los Angeles, and to use 10 Gbps links for science applications starting in the Spring of 2003. Caltech and CERN have recently installed servers, routers and switches at the StarLight in Chicago and in Geneva to drive the development of the transatlantic networks needed by high-energy and nuclear physics. By mid-2003 physicists at Caltech, UCSD and other universities in the CMS experiment will begin use of National Light Rail to build the first intercontinental network for science using a 10 Gbps wavelength, stretching from California to Geneva and Amsterdam.