CHICAGO -- The National Science Foundation has awarded a three-year, $540,000 grant to Jason Leigh and Oliver Yu of the University of Illinois at Chicago's Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) to develop Quanta -- a software system for supporting adaptive Quality-of-Service (QoS) over extremely high-speed optical networks. Quanta will consist of novel networking protocols designed to handle a wide variety of extremely high bandwidth application traffic flows. Its QoS architecture will allow flexible control of these protocols, and support wire and optical QoS mechanisms such as Generalized Multi Protocol Label/Lambda Switching (GMPLS). This means that distributed scientists will communicate more fluidly, and distributed applications will communicate more quickly and efficiently. Ultimately, both advantages will translate to scientists being able to make discoveries more rapidly.National Science Foundation (NSF)