The information highway is adding lanes. These new thorough-fares aren't designed for trucks carrying bulk E-mail or bus-loads of sightseers cruising along the Web. The new infobahns are strictly for science, and they're changing the way researchers work.
New computing, networking, and data-storage technologies are melding into meganetworks aimed at researchers' growing need to put their heads together, even if only virtually, with diverse specialists around the world. These collaborations aim to analyze complex images and large amounts of data, sharing and manipulating pictures and numbers in real time.
"We have a torrent of data that this new generation of instruments is producing," says Dan Reed, director of the Renaissance Computing Institute spanning the campuses of Duke University, the University of North Carolina, and North Carolina State University. "The problems that we want to solve increasingly require the assembly of teams that are not only geographically distributed, but also multidisciplinary. ...
