Kansas City, Missouri-based Sprint Corp reports that its US-wide fibre optic telephone network will be used in US Department of Defense-funded research into supercomputing networking: the three-year project involves transmitting data over Sprint’s network at speeds 10 times what had been previously possible on a supercomputer highway; one application of the technology would enable a military commander seated at a computer to fly, drive or walk electronically over a training battlefield using data over the Sprint network, Sprint said, adding that it will be working with some half dozen other research organisations in the effort and is providing several million dollars in equipment and network services and will soon link the Minnesota Supercomputer Center Inc with the Earth Resource Observation Systems Data Center in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and the University of Kansas in Lawrence with the US Army’s Future Battle Laboratory in Fort Leavenworth.
