The goals of the Sequoia 2000 Network are to provide high throughput for the massive observation input data and image output data characterizing global change applications, as well as real-time services for animations and collaboration tools such as video conferencing. The first phase of the network will be based on a T3 (45 Mb/s) backbone and FDDI (fiber distributed data interface) for local distribution. The research issues that are emphasized include protocols that provide deterministic and statistical performance guarantees and take advantage of hierarchical coding of information, and the design of I/O system software that integrates process and device communication software with network protocol software. >