NYSERNet Spotlight

Tim Lance, President and Board Chairman, NYSERNet, Inc.

Twenty five years ago this summer representatives from New York's major universities gathered to discuss how, as a community, they might optimize use of computing resources across the state and access supercomputers (including the Cornell Theory Center) somehow to be linked by NSFNET, then still in planning. In the months that followed, this decision to collaborate resulted in the not-for-profit corporation known as NYSERNet, one of the Internet's most enduring and successful partnerships.

Over the next two and a half decades, the NYSERNet community created five generations of advanced networks, network tools and capabilities. Our initial 56 kbps backbone, dwarfed in capacity by NYSERNet's optical infrastructure now spanning the State, nevertheless marked the Internet protocol's first use outside the federal government. We produced two commercial companies, PSI, the world's first ISP, and AppliedTheory. Stability resulting from almost no changes in NYSERNet's Board during the first decade enabled our collective exploration and advancement of this new technology called the Internet.

Perhaps our greatest challenges and achievements have occurred over the last dozen years. Retirements, promotions, and job opportunities have resulted in almost complete Board and staff turnover (only one original member remains of the former, and of the latter, only two). Yet during this time, despite multiple external strains and threats, the trust that permitted our founding, our willingness to take calculated strategic risks, and our commitment to achieving something we know to be greater together than any of us could do alone, have not only persisted, but strengthened.

The rich infusion of new ideas and perspectives is change's brightest facet. During these tumultuous years NYSERNet moved from relying on carrier circuits to controlling transport. Following the dotcom collapse and September 11, 2001, we risked everything to deploy fiber in New York City. Today that fiber project is robust and sustainable, its major unexpected benefit creation of a preeminent global peering point for research and education at 32 Avenue of the Americas. Our statewide optical infrastructure's enormous capacity allows us to dream about and create new tools, like our business continuity center in Syracuse.

Despite change's rapid pace, the question today remains the same as a quarter century ago: How can we collaborate to create and share more powerful resources than any of us could create alone. Two years ago we began to explore this issue anew with research colleagues from industry (IBM, GE, Corning, Northrup Grumman, to name just a few) and government (NYSTAR), focusing on the shared use of computers to attack problems. Today's computers are a lot bigger, growing log linearly according to Moore's Law, and the network pipes bigger still, growing log-log-log linearly.

Refreshingly, these discussions share a conclusion: people are what count. Whether encouraging young people to pursue STEM disciplines, or providing programming people to help researchers with a data intensive problem make effective use of massive parallel supercomputers, or the researchers themselves, or teachers at any level, it is people who matter. The problems that we, and our children and grandchildren, must confront are huge: environment, energy, health care, global sustainability. The technologies that we have helped develop may offer critical tools for finding solutions. But perhaps the past twenty five years' most important legacy, born of trust, is the ability to solve important problems together that none of us could tackle alone. As we celebrate our silver anniversary let us resolve to make this sustaining realization the enduring legacy of our golden anniversary as well.

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