The National Science Foundation has awarded a three-year, $2.9 million grant to the Web 100 project to boost end-to-end network performance for research collaboration.
Web 100, a joint effort of the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, National Center for Atmospheric Research and National Center for Supercomputing Applications, aims to bring 100-Mbps data transmission rates to researchers' desks.
The NSF grant will underwrite development of software that can automatically tune operating systems to take advantage of available network bandwidth. Many researchers have access to 100-Mbps networks but often get no more than 3-Mbps throughput because their OSes hamper Transmission Control Protocol performance.