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 National Advanced Manufacturing TestbedThe National Advanced Manufacturing Testbed (NAMT) has operated at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) since 1996 as a distributed testbed to enable collaborative research between scientists and engineers at NIST, remote industry locations, and government and university laboratories. From 1996-2000, the NAMT was the primary platform for the Information-Based Manufacturing Program of the NIST Manufacturing Engineering Laboratory (MEL). During that period, the NAMT supported the information technology (IT) needs of a collection of advanced research and development (R&D) projects that served hundreds of customers of the NIST MEL and each of the other NIST Measurements and Standards Laboratories, as well as the NIST Manufacturing Extension Partnership (www.mep.nist.gov) and Advanced Technology Program (www.atp.nist.gov). The NAMT now operates at NIST as an infrastructural resource that is available to support various activities that rely upon and exploit IT in the conduct of advanced manufacturing research and the delivery of NIST measurement and testing services. The NAMT has been a catalyst across NIST to demonstrate and develop competence in the exploitation of IT to improve (1) the conduct of manufacturing research performed by NIST for and with American industry, (2) the delivery of NIST measurement services, and (3) the means by which NIST scientists and engineers access the tools and information they need to do their jobs, including equipment, software, other NIST scientists, and non-NIST collaborators Partners in the research activities and measurement services supported by the NAMT can be dispersed geographically about the country, conducting activities and sharing information between an array of organizations and physical facilities. To support the conduct of research and delivery of services, the NAMT has provided the physical means for information exchange between and among project partners. As such, the NAMT was designed around an infrastructure for computing and communications whose foundation is a leading-edge, high-performance, network backbone. The collaborative research and measurement service environment supported by the NAMT is similar in many ways to the concepts of a collaboratory, which can be considered as a "research center without walls." Within the NAMT collaboratory, various tools and systems that use computing and networking technology to aid manufacturing research and the delivery of measurement services can be integrated together to provide an environment that allows scientists and engineers to make more efficient use of manufacturing and measurement resources, regardless of where they are located. In the NAMT collaboratory, partners can perform their research without regard to geographic location–interacting with colleagues, accessing equipment and instrumentation, sharing data and computational resources, and accessing information in digital libraries. Additional information about the NAMT and the projects it has supported, along with specific NAMT accomplishments, can be found in NISTIR 6383, "National Advanced Manufacturing Testbed," and NISTIR 6490, "Information Based Manufacturing Program Summary and Accomplishments." Contact: David C. Stieren |
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Date created:
June 7, 2001 |