Researchers exploring that vision at five major U.S. universities got a $12-million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) this week, as part of a program that doled out $144 million to advance computer science.

The Internet project, dubbed Infrastructure for Resilient Internet Systems (IRIS), will attempt to solve two of the biggest problems faced by Web users: sites being down when too many people try to access a single server and hackers attacking the servers on which information is stored.

"If one node is attacked or runs into problems, the information would move to other nodes where it would still be accessible," said Frans Kaashoek, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Kaashoek is part of a team of researchers at MIT, the University of California at Berkeley, Rice University in Houston, New York University and the International Computer Science Institute that hopes to develop the system in the next five years.

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