EARLY FEEDBACK ON VERY HIGH SPEED BACKBONE NETWORK (VBNS) EXTREMELY POSITIVE; MCI and National Science Foundation (NSF) Point to Dozens of New and Vital Applications.

SAN DIEGO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 5, 1995--Pivotal questions about how we live and how healthy we can be -- and more "universal" inquiries about the galaxies -- are being answered faster than ever as a result of early success of the vBNS, a network developed by MCI and the NSF.

Introduced in April, 1995, the vBNS is the first nationwide high-speed network to use advanced information age technologies that enable massive amounts of voice, data and video to be combined and transmitted at speeds nearly four times faster than previous technologies.

"With vBNS, MCI and the NSF have literally `ratcheted' the definition of applied science," said Jerry Edgerton, MCI vice president of government markets. "These early applications are already helping us forecast weather more efficiently, better understand biological molecules to fight heart disease, and more easily interpret how our galaxy was formed."

The vBNS has served as an experimental platform for developing new national networking applications, linking five supercomputing sites across the nation. It is used to develop critical technologies and applications that will run over the National Information Infrastructure (NII), sometimes referred to as the Information Superhighway.

The vBNS provides scientists and researchers with faster data links and communications between supercomputing sites working to solve fundamental "Grand Challenges" in science and engineering. Dubbed Grand Challenges by the U.S. Office of Science and Technology Policy, these fundamental questions have broad economic and scientific import -- and carry solutions that can be advanced by applying high performance computing techniques and advanced networking resources. Among the applications on display here:

o A simulated merger of the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies using multiple massively parallel supercomputers at all four NSF centers.

o Supercomputer programs that analyze how biological cells communicate with each other via the interaction of specific "macromolecules" on their surfaces.

o Neurological and parasitic studies with "virtual reality" tie-ins.

o A "Living Schoolbook" demonstration of the interactive schoolroom of tomorrow.

o Storm research applications to analyze the genesis and development of tornadoes.

"The vBNS has been an unprecedented aid to scientists with an ever-increasing need for speed, power and modeling capabilities," said Paul Young, assistant director of the NSF's directorate of Computer and Information Science and Engineering.

About the vBNS --------------

The vBNS uses MCI's nationwide network of advanced switching and fiber optic transmission technologies, known as Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) and Synchronous Optical Network (SONET). The combination of ATM and SONET enables very high-speed, high capacity voice, data, and video signals to be combined and transmitted "on demand." The vBNS operates at speeds of 155 Mbps (million bits of data per second) and is planned to operate at greater than 600 Mbps by 1996. The vBNS speeds are achieved by connecting Internet Protocol (IP) through an ATM switching matrix, and running this combination on the SONET network.

In 1996, the vBNS will be able to carry about 14 times more traffic than the former NSF Network (NSFNET), which carried 100 billion data packets or the equivalent of the Library of Congress holdings, every month.

The vBNS allows scientists to create mathematical models of real life situations and run algorithms that predict changes in those events. Supercomputing and vBNS make it possible to study the problems that are either too expensive or difficult to examine through observation or experimentation. The five-year, $50-million agreement ties together the Pittsburgh and San Diego Supercomputing Centers; the Cornell Theory Center; the National Center for Supercomputer Applications in Urbana, Illinois; and the national Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado. The vBNS also will be accessible to select applications sites through four network access points in New York, San Francisco, Chicago and Washington, D.C.

CASA exhibiting ---------------

Also on display here is CASA, one of five gigabit network testbeds formed in 1990 as part of a Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI) program, a collaboration of research institutions and industrial organizations with the goal of attaining gigabit network capability for research and education communities.

Principal research organizations in the CASA wide-area testbed are the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in New Mexico; the California Institute of Technology (CalTech) and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena; and the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) in conjunction with UCLA.

The CASA testbed has allowed scientists to investigate distributed supercomputing over wide-area high-speed networks, with the aim of providing new levels of computation resources to help solve scientific problems.

CASA applications at Supercomputing 95 include scientific "visualizations" over CASA using "distributed multiscale algorithms, and biomedical and telemedicine applications for remote archiving, retrieval and analysis of patient records and radiographical data.

The National Science Foundation is an independent agency of the federal government established in 1950 to promote and advance scientific progress through grants to educational and research institutions for research and education in the sciences, mathematics and engineering.

MCI, headquartered in Washington, D.C., is one of the world's largest and fastest-growing diversified communications companies. With annual revenue of over $13 billion, MCI offers consumers and businesses a broad portfolio of services including long distance, wireless, local access, paging, Internet software, advanced global telecommunications services and music distribution and merchandising.

CONTACT: MCI Public Relations

Ed Bergstraesser, 1-800-644-NEWS or 312/938-4958