ENGINEERING

PITTSBURGH, PA -- Gwendolyn Huntoon, assistant director of the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, has agreed to serve as the first executive director of The Quilt, an effort of many U.S. regional networking organizations to promote and extend research network services. She will continue in her leadership role at PSC while taking responsibility, through The Quilt, to coordinate many groups nationwide in development of next-generation network technologies. Huntoon directs the networking resource group at PSC, which carries out advanced research and provides consulting and training for universities and research centers nationwide. In this role, she has led development of the Pittsburgh GigaPop, a high-speed network hub that provides advanced network services for Carnegie Mellon University, Pennsylvania State University, the University of Pittsburgh and West Virginia University. "I'm pleased to have this opportunity to expand upon the work that PSC's networking group has done in high-performance network research and infrastructure," said Huntoon. "Many of the projects The Quilt will be focusing on are of strategic interest to PSC, CMU and the broader Pittsburgh GigaPop community." Over 15 non-profit research and education network organizations, which provide network resources for thousands of U.S. research and education institutions, have pooled resources to form the Quilt. The University Corporation for Advanced Internet Development (UCAID), a Washington, DC-based organization that promotes networking for education and research, is providing organizational support for The Quilt. The Quilt's initial objectives include: (1) to provide a forum for best practices related to implementation of fiber-optic network infrastructure, (2) to support improved end-to-end network performance through uniform standards to measure and assess performance, and (3) to aggregate the Internet services buying power of The Quilt's participants. For more information about The Quilt, see: www.thequilt.net For more information about networking at PSC, see: www.psc.edu/networking