Partner Organizations: Northern New England Gigapop Working Gro: In-kind Support; Facilities; Collaborative Research
The NoNOX serves as a working group to coordinate the participation of the three northern New England States (Main, New Hampshire, and Vermont) in the New England GigaPop (Northern Crossroads, aka NOX). Non-UVM participants include Douglas Green (University of New Hampshire) and Steve Campbell (Dartmouth College).
NOX (http://www.nox.org/) is patterned after the Southern Crossroads (SoX) initiative by the members of the Southeastern The Northern Crossroads (NoX) facilitates high performance networking among academic institutions in New England. Participants include institutions of higher learning and other organizations that support research, education, economic development. More information about the NoX can be found at it's website, http://www.nox.org/.
Other collaborators:
NCSA - EPSCoR Alliance. The University of Vermont, an EPSCoR institution, has participated in several of the NCSA - EPSCoR Alliance activities such as the conferences at UIUC and the regional meetings in Portland, Maine and Boston, Massachusetts. NLANR (http://www.nlanr.net/) UVM is participating in the NLANR hosts monitoring program. Vermont EPSCoR - Christopher Allen, the EPSCoR principal investigator at UVM continues to play an important advisory role to the UVM vBNS project.
Activities and findings:
Research and Education Activities: The following vBNS connection activities occurred during the perios March 2001 - December 2001: 1. Upgrade of vBNS / Abeline Service During the summer of 2001, Douglas Green (University of New Hampshire), Steve Campbell (Dartmouth College), and Randy Spooner (University of Vermont) met to discuss upgrading the connection to the New England NoX to provide OC-3 capabilities to the participating institutions. This upgrade is essentially complete, although UVM will not be immediately obtain OC-3 services via this route. UVM connectivity to the NoX is now operating at the 40 Mbps rather than the 25 Mbps available under the previous arrangement. The shifting economics of OC-3 and OC-12 serices as well as the growth of commodity internet requirements suggest that there may be significant advantages to obtaining commodity services in the Boston market and backhauling them to the individual institutions directly. 2. UVM Campus Networking Enhancement 2.a Quality of Service Activites A primary network activity at UVM during this period was work in the quality of service area - activity especially highlighted when students returned to campus with Aimster, KaZaM, and other peer-to-peer file sharing applications. The University has been pursuing a 'traffic shaping' model which, when combined with increased bandwidth (upgrqaded from 20 Mbps to 40 Mbps on the commodity side and from 25 to 40 on the Internet2 side) as well as more intelligent caching has resulted in significant improvement in performance. In addition, the University has added a second Network Engineer to the campus Network Services team. Her primary responsibility will be in the quality of service arena. 2.b Advanced Caching In July of 2001, the University was invited to join the Akamai network. Akamai would install caching engines at the university at no cost, the University would provide siting facilites. Installation was delayed slightly by the events of September 11th, but is now complete. 2.c Security Activities As part of a computer and network service audit, the University is updating it's security policies. Features will include a campus-wide network ID, virtual lan's with different security ('firewall classes') profiles, and network accounting by user rather than network address. The VLAN architecture is expected to assist in QoS issues by aiding in the identification, for example, of high performance research clusters within a physical subnet. A campus wide security team has been workings since May 2001 to draft this policy. The policy is in the late draft stage, and some of it's recommendations been be enforced beginning January 1, 2002. 2.d Wireless Network Development The University began rolling out IEEE 802.11b network zones in the Spring of 2001. By the middle of the fall, six buildings had working wireless services - the Billings Student Center, the Bailey-Howe Library, the School of Nursing's Rowell Building, the School of Business Adminstration's Kalkin Building, the School of Natural Resource's Aiken Building, and the Waterman Building which houses the College of Education as well as Computing and Information Technology Services. Additional rollout is on a lower priority 'per damand' model to accomodate the needs of the VLAN rollout as well as to anticipate IEEE 802.11a technologies. 2.e Network Planning Network growth at the University of Vermont has been doubling every year. This suggests that the current 80 Mbytes of bandwidth (40 for Internet2, 40 for commodity service) will be inadequate a year from now. The economics of OC-3 and OC-12 in Vermont, however, have led us to investigate other avenues for high performance service such as purchashing internet service in Boston and 'back hauling' it to Vermont privately. 3. UVM vBNS Applications and Training 3.a Ubiquitous High Performance In today's environment, computing performance is often taken for granted, especially among researchers who have been active for a decade or so. Tasks that used to be considered impossible are now routine. A recent Computer Science Department Seminar by Prof. Xindong Wu on 'Web Information Exploration' illustrated this by examining web transaction databases which are in the neighborhood of 100 - 1000 Mbytes and which can generation 1 - 10 Gbyte 'rules'. Students were reminded that just a few years ago you would have to wait for Fedex or UPS to deliver the data, now you just download it in a few minutes. 3.b Internet2 Virtual Meeting This year, Internet2.Edu held it's first ever Internet2 Virtual Meeting. A contingent of researchers and administrators at the College of Medicine, who had originally been scheduled to fly to Austin for the meeting, attended 'virtually' instead. Even though the members of the team were well versed in telemedicine issues, they were struck by the ease by which a conference like this can be used, and by the higher degree of interactivity. One remarked 'I had expected it to be more like cartoons. But it was really useful.' 3.c Internet Delivery of Video (Scola) Albert Joy and Lyman Ross of the University of Vermont Library Faculty are participating in the University of Nebraska - Lincoln's NSF funded project to facilitate real-time video pbroadcasting of SCOLA (Satellite COmmunication for LeArning) programs. This project aims to catalize work on multicast routing, quality of service extensions, scalability, and security. 3.d College of Medicine Michael Caputo, at the University of Vermont's College of Medicine's Dean's Office, is leading a team to develop a proposal to have the College of Medicine designated as an Internet2 Affiliate.
Findings: During the time period March 2001 and December 2001, the primary accomplishments this project include - improving QoS via management, bandwidth upgrade and advanced caching. - promoting a high-performance computing and networking awareness
Training and Development: Professional development during this period featured one-on-one meetings with faculty and researchers as well as an Internet2 awareness activities such as distributing internet2 project news and network advances through normal campus enews channels. The goal of the public announcement campaign is to build an awareness of high-performance networking activities and opportunities.
Outreach Activities: In addition to the campus presentations as above, we have made extensive use of the general readership campus newsgroup - UVMToday and the campus bi-weekly newspaper, The UVM Record. We've also used targeted mailing tools such as - Gateway Listserv: the planning forum for the proposed learning and information gateway which will combine library, computing, and interactive learning functions. - GradNet Listserv: the UVM graduate student forum - I2-Team Listserv: a list of researchers who have indicated that they would like to be kept up to date on the status of Internet2 at UVM. - Plan-IT Listserv: the UVM information technology forum
Journal Publications:
Other Specific Products:
http://vbns.uvm.edu
This site serves as a repository for reports and presentations and supplements the use of mailing lists for communication of vBNS and Internet2 events.
Contributions:
Contributions within Discipline:
With the installation of the vBNS/Abilene connection, researchers at the University of Vermont are able to participate in the emerging high performance networking environment of the 21st century. In addition, the University's emphasis on undergraduate research experience helps us contribute to the development of the next generation of scientists, engineers, scholars, and citizens.
A number of projects under development at UVM have advanced networking technologies as core components and are being pursued in parallel with the efforts included in this activity. Notable examples include: - The Center for Teaching and Learning is supporting a wide variety of professional development programs for technology emphasizing active and interactive learning approaches incorporating collaborative learning environments. - The College of Education and Social Services 'Preparing Tomorrows Teachers for Technology' (PT3) program under the leadership of Bruce Richardson, Joyce Morris, and Holly Buckland has developed a comprehensive professional development focusing on both the College of Education and College of Arts and Science's faculty. A second component of that program focuses on transforming the undergraduate curriculum to better support active, constructivist learning models.
The re-engineering of the existing campus network infrastructure along the following gigapop architectural models - designed and installed a campus gigabit backbone supporting alternate internal pathways (in operation) - redesign and installation of new commodity internet service architecture featuring redundant access and higher performance. - initiated a series of quality of service activities including local caching, performance monitoring, and bandwidth allocation.
Special Requirements for Annual Project Report:
Unobligated funds: less than 20 percent of current funds Categories for which nothing is reported: Products: Journal Publications Products: Book or other one-time publication Products: Other Specific Product Contributions to Other Disciplines Contributions Beyond Science and Engineering Special Reporting Requirements Animal, Human Subjects, Biohazards