I-Light collaboration wins EDUCAUSE Award for IU, Purdue

		September 19, 2003

By Greg Moore

EDUCAUSE has chosen IU and Purdue University to receive its 2003 Award for Excellence in Networking for I-Light: Indiana’s Optical Fiber Network. The award recognizes “strategic, innovative networking programs or practices that improve the quality of campus network services through new or enhanced network architectures, infrastructure, integration, management and/or operational practices.” The EDUCAUSE Network Award committee commended the collaboration among university, city and state entities to create I-Light.

To meet the dramatically increased demand for network capacity to support teaching, learning and research, IU and Purdue collaborated to create I-Light, a university-owned fiber optic network linking IU Bloomington, IUPUI and Purdue in West Lafayette, to each other, the Internet and Internet2.

Frank O’Bannon, the beloved governor of Indiana who died in office last week following a stroke, had activated I-Light in October 2002 following the completion of a two-year, $5.3 million project.

“The state’s large research universities have seen a remarkable return on investment from I-Light in initiatives that allow the sharing of complex computation and very large data over the I-Light network,” said Michael McRobbie, IU vice president for information technology and for research. In addition, I-Light is one of the advantages that the state has been able to leverage to promote Indiana as a destination for life sciences and biotechnology investment.”

Indiana has recently granted funding to extend I-Light out further into other areas of Indiana. This phase, called I-Light2, promises further economic benefits for Indiana. I-Light2 fits well with the Energize Indiana legislation recently passed by the General Assembly, which calls for Indiana to focus on four main industries, including life sciences and information technology, to enhance the state’s economy.

“I-Light provides a key building block in the further development of high performance networking infrastructure in the state as well as the developing national cyberinfrastructure,” said Brian Voss, IU associate vice president for telecommunications and chief operating officer for IU’s Pervasive Technology Labs.

Voss and Dave Jent, associate director of network infrastructures, will accept the award on behalf of IU at the annual EDUCAUSE conference in Anaheim, Calif., in November.

Both IU and Purdue will be making session presentations at the gathering.

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