Building the World's Most Reliable Network: ESnet's Sandy Merola Honored
May 16, 1996
By Jeffery Kahn, JBKahn@LBL.gov
"Cooperation between every site on the network is the key," says
Leighton. "Sandy Merola has been instrumental in forging the
cooperation that distinguishes ESnet. He is one of the key architects
of ESnet."
For the past seven years, Merola, the deputy director of Computing
Sciences here, has chaired ESnet's steering committee. It is composed
of member scientists who are users of the network and includes site and
distributed computing coordinating subcommittees. According to Steve
Wolf, former head of the National Science Foundation's computing and
networking group, this group is the single most-effective committee in
government.
With the move of ESnet headquarters from Livermore to here, Merola has
stepped down as chair of the committee but remains as a member. Last
week, Dave Nelson, director of DOE's Office of Computational and
Technology Research, came here to honor Merola for his service.
Nelson presented Merola a plaque signed by Martha Krebs, director of
DOE's Office of Energy Research. It reads: "In recognition for
outstanding and visionary chairmanship of the Energy Science Network
(ESnet) Steering Committee from 1989 to 1996. You led the ESSC through
a major upgrade of the network's capabilities and through a
reorganization of the committee's concerns to a greater focus on the
role of the network in enabling research. The result is that ESnet is
truly DOE's network for the future."
Merola says the steering committee he had chaired must foresee future
network needs of researchers such as videoconferencing, distributed
computing, and the ability to remotely operate DOE national user
facilities. "We spell out future needs but," said Merola, "the real
implementation is done by the ESnet staff and the committee members at
their respective sites." Networks are evolving very quickly, says
Merola. Circa 1970, the first traffic began to flow over computer
networks at the rate of about 40 words a second. Today, ESnet moves
about one million words a second.
"Right now," said Merola, "ESnet is the world's fastest and most
respected production computing network. Jim Leighton and his staff
deserve much of the credit for ESnet's success. We can do things that
were inconceivable 20 years ago. The job from here is to be able to
say the same thing in the decades ahead."
When you think of computer networks, wires and routers and protocols
come to mind. Jim Leighton, who manages the ESnet network linking DOE
Energy Science research sites, says the real secret to a free-flowing
network is getting people to work together.