Mid-Atlantic Crossroads (MAX) Membership

The Library intends to enter into a contract with the University of Maryland, College Park to provide membership in Mid-Atlantic Crossroads (MAX) Mid-Atlantic Crossroads is the foremost advanced networking consortium in the U.S. Led by the research and education community. Since 1999, Mid-Atlantic Crossroads promotes its members' mission by providing both leading-edge network capabilities and unique partnership opportunities that together facilitate the development, deployment and use of revolutionary Internet technologies. Mid-Atlantic Crossroads is a not for profit advanced networking consortium comprising more than 39 U.S. participants comprising universities, government laboratories, federal agencies, and non profit institutions. The organization is governed by an executive Board of Trustees and Strategic Councils consisting of leaders who represent the Broad membership. Mid-Atlantic Crossroads members leverage a high-performance network, infrastructure and extensive worldwide partnerships to support and enhance their educational and research missions. Beyond simply providing network capacity, Mid-Atlantic Crossroads actively engages the membership community in the development of important new technology including middleware, security, network research, and performance measurement capabilities which are critical to the progress of the internet. Membership with Mid-Atlantic Crossroads provides Library staff and visiting scholars with access to Intemet2 delivering high performance, low latency, and efficient (1 hop) access to some of the top content destinations in the world including: Google, Yahoo, NetFlix, and other commercial content providers. Intemet2's commercial peering service offers a low cost path with higher performance goals than commercial alternatives. The Advanced Layer 3 Service offers leading edge network characteristics to meet the constantly evolving needs of high-speed research and collaboration. The IP network is built across a carrierclass infrastructure and supports leading-edge IPv4, 1Pv6, multicast and other advanced networking protocols, as well as the ability to more easily and flexibly increase its capacity beyond any other research and education network. Intemet2 members take advantage of this advanced network through engineered to allow wide reachability across the R&E community with abundant "headroom" optimized for peak performance. The network is also engineered for the most demanding traffic patterns, ensuring optimal performance. The goal of this service is for users to never experience dropped packets, jitter or other underperformance characteristics of commodity networks.