maginable. "It's very hard to predict what's going to be next," says Krisztina Holly, execu- tive director of the Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "Certainly the biggest changes will be disruptive technologies." 5.2.1 Riding the LambdaRail An experimental new high-speed computing network-the National LambdaRail (NLR)-will allow researchers nationwide to collaborate in advanced research on topics ranging from cancer to the physical forces driving hurricanes. The NLR consortium of universities and corporations, formed over the past several months, is developing a network that will eventually include 11,000 miles of high-speed connections linking major population areas. The LambdaRail name combines the Greek symbol for light waves with "rail," which echoes an earlier form of network that united the country. NLR is perhaps the most ambitious research and education networking initiative since ARPANET and NSFnet, both of which eventually led to the commercialization of the Internet. Like those earlier projects, NLR is designed to stimulate and support innovative network research to go above and beyond the current Internet's incremental evolution. The new infrastructure offers a wide range of facilities, capabilities, and services in support of both application level and networking level experiments. NLR will serve a diverse set of communities, including computational scien- tists, distributed systems researchers, and networking researchers. NLR's goal is to bring these communities closer together to solve complex architectural and end-to-end network scaling challenges. Researchers have used the recently created Internet2 as their newest super- highway for high-speed networking. That system's very success has given rise THE INTERNET RULES-IP TECHNOLOGIES to the NLR project. "Hundreds of colleges, universities, and other research institutions have come to depend on Internet2 for reliable high-speed trans- mission of research data, video conferencing, and coursewo