* Manhattan’s American Museum of Natural History connects to Internet 2
My 3-year-old loves dinosaurs – in fact, I think he’s part T-Rex – so we recently made a rare trip into Manhattan to see the magnificent dinosaur bones at the American Museum of Natural History. But the museum is much more than a collection of fossils; it’s a living, breathing research institution with more than 200 scientists. And those scientists need Apatosaurus-sized bandwidth.
To that end the museum a few years ago connected to the Internet 2, a high-speed network for universities and other research institutions. It was the first independent museum to join the network.
One of the primary reasons for joining was to handle scans of the night sky – an astrophysicist was comparing a set of photographic plates taken in the late 1950s and ‘60s with a new set taken by the Hubble space telescope. The movement of those scans across the network connection would tie it up for hours. After connecting to Internet 2, the time was reduced to minutes.
Interestingly, the museum also shoots original short nature videos and distributes them to other museums – in high definition – for displays and exhibits. With the Internet 2 connection, it can send those videos over the network.
In the future, the museum plans to use the connection to remotely control a telescope in Chile. It will also use it to serve up photographic images, X-rays, videos and audio to other institutions.
The museum uses coarse wave-division multiplexing over fiber to make use of eight 1G bit/sec waves in its connection to NYSERNet’s peering facility in downtown Manhattan, where it connects to Internet 2.
