The Unidata Program Center, through cooperative efforts with over 100 university and research domains, has successfully relayed large amounts of atmospheric data in near real time. Meeting future data relay needs will be a challenge in the face of growing volumes of real-time data that is of interest to the Unidata community.

In an effort to meet these future needs, Unidata is testing scientific data relay using a network built from INN (Internet News), a freely available, open source, C based package distributed by the Internet Software Consortium. Unlike Unidata's Local Data Manager data relay software (which drives the Unidata Internet Data Distribution (IDD) network), INN is based on the Network News Transport Protocol (NNTP). To date, data volumes of over 30+ GB/day have been successfully relayed from Boulder to Washington D.C. via a three site network. We are currently building a network level prototype to test various configuration possibilities that this software supports.