QUANTA is a toolkit for supporting TeraNode applications over optical networks.  Getting terascale collaborative applications to work optimally on a high speed optical network is not as simple as connecting ones computer to the Internet. Today's protocol stacks and scientific applications cannot and do not know how to utilize this extreme level of bandwidth even when it is available. We intend to address this problem with Quanta, a cross-platform adaptive networking toolkit for supporting the extraordinary networking requirements of terascale collaborative applications. Quanta will consist of a collection of novel networking protocols that are designed for handling a wide variety of extremely high bandwidth application traffic flows; and a Quality of Service (QoS) architecture to flexibly control these protocols and support electronic and optical QoS mechanisms such as Generalized Multi Protocol Label/Lambda Switching (GMPLS). The goal is to provide an easy to use system that will allow programmers to specify the data transfer characteristics of their application at a high level, and let Quanta transparently translate these requirements into the appropriate transmission protocol and network QoS services.