The Wisconsin Advanced Internet Laboratory is on its way to being the premier Internet laboratory in the country, following a nearly $1 million hardware donation.

WAIL, located on the University of Wisconsin campus, is a laboratory set up to be a micro-Internet, mimicking aspects of the World Wide Web so research can be done on ways of speeding up the Internet, making it more efficient and more secure. This is a highly anticipated project, as it will be a pioneer in the field of Internet hardware research once it is completed.

The donation came from EMC Corporation, a worldwide software company specializing in data storage and management software. The local subsidiary of EMC is Goliath Networks, a technical consulting firm in Madison.

“Technology continues to be a driving force of change in the field of education, and EMC recognizes the importance of providing students with cutting-edge tools to solve challenging and important IT issues,” said Don Swatik, EMC Solutions Group vice president, in a recent UW news release.

“EMC is especially focused on intensive economy and is delighted to assist in WAIL’s progress in this realm. This new facility will not only assist in advancing WAIL’s research efforts, but will allow students to gain firsthand technology expertise.”

WAIL will receive three Symmetrix Networked Storage Systems, servers that can store large amounts of information, a necessity for simulating the Internet. Additionally, WAIL will also receive software, support and funding for the project and the graduate program.

Paul Barford, the project director and assistant professor of computer sciences, said he was very pleased with the donation. “With this donation, we will have the ability to investigate a broad array of computer sciences in this lab we are building,” Barford said.

This is not the first donation WAIL has received. Several months ago, John Morgridge, Cisco Systems Incorporated chairman and UW-Madison alumnus, donated nearly $3.5 million in Cisco equipment, software and support to the project.

Events of the past month have added extreme importance to the completion of this project when seven of the 13 core servers that run the World Wide Web were crippled by Distributed Denial of Service attacks, nearly bringing down the Internet across the country. WAIL will be investigating ways to remove this threat from the Internet. “Absolutely, one of our definite areas of investigation will be DoS attacks,” Barford said.