The University of Illinois will lead a new $121 million effort to build a better technology network to link researchers.

The National Science Foundation is providing the money over five years with the possibility of funding for five more years to build a secure environment for research to happen.

John Towns of the university's National Center for Supercomputing Applications is the project leader. He says the university is 1 of 17 institutions involved in building the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment, or XSEDE.

The work is intended to improve on the existing TeraGrid system.

The idea is to give researchers anywhere the ability to share data and collaborate as if they were working in the same lab with the same sort of equipment.