NEWS RELEASE July 11, 2001 TerraFly Project High-Performance Database Research Center School of Computer Science Florida International University

Contact: Martha Gutierrez Phone: (305) 348-6262 or (305) 348-1706 | Fax: (305) 348-1705 | E-mail: Address: 11200 SW 8th Street, Miami, FL 33199

IBM has recently made two large awards totaling $6.7 million to the TerraFly project of the High-Performance Database Research Center at Florida International University.

In April, IBM awarded the HPDRC 200 instances of IBM's most advanced DB2 database product and additional software; its total retail value is over $5.5 million. Then, in July, IBM awarded the HPDRC over $1.2 million worth of computer hardware under its Shared University Research Program. Researchers at IBM will work alongside HPDRC faculty and research staff to create an exemplary case of publicly beneficial collaboration between the academic and industrial realms.

TerraFly is a new Internet-based technology that makes it possible for users to "fly over" vast land areas using only an ordinary Web browser. By using high-resolution imagery collected by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and other sources, users can experience an overhead view of almost any location in the United States at a one-meter resolution-without the expense of standard GIS application software. The project, which is funded by NASA, the National Science Foundation, and IBM, can be accessed on the Web at http://www.terrafly.com.

TerraFly is a project of the High-Performance Database Research Center (HPDRC) at Florida International University (FIU). The HPDRC and its constituent FIU-NASA Regional Applications Center (RAC) comprise 100 researchers working under the direction of Dr. Naphtali Rishe, Professor of Computer Science and the first-ever recipient of FIU's Outstanding Faculty Award. The U.S. government has funded the Center's work on database technology, the Internet, and data visualization at $17 million.