Thursday, June 20, 2002

Planning to Use the Internet2 Network? A Few Other Upgrades Might Be in Order By FLORENCE OLSEN Some college administrators have concluded that they have to do more than just complain when faculty members use the Internet2 project's fast, high-tech networks to do things in the same ways they've always been done. "The technology has gotten ahead of people's thinking how best to use it," says Bruce A. Metz, vice president for information technology at Tufts University. Often it's not a lack of new ideas that prevents faculty members from taking full advantage of their institutions' membership in Internet2, the collaborative effort by higher education and industry to develop the next generation of Internet applications and technologies. Colleges that are connected to Abilene, the Internet2 backbone, frequently need to make other technology upgrades and investments before faculty members can make the best use of the enormous carrying capacity that Abilene offers. Many colleges lack the fast local networks, high-speed computer clusters, and ample data storage that are crucial to the kinds of advanced research that Abilene was designed for, says Gregory H. Wettstein, a research-support manager at North Dakota State University. The university wants to eliminate all barriers for its researchers, Mr. Wettstein says, but doing so will be expensive. For example, if financing is approved, the university will install a fail-safe, fiber-optic network on campus that can move 80 billion bits of information a second -- a network that is 820 times faster than the current campus network. That project could cost about $10-million. North Dakota State has been working to remove other barriers to Internet2-grade research by providing network security and database help for researchers. Mr. Wettstein says few people realize that Internet2 traffic mixes with commercial Internet traffic before it gets routed onto Abilene, the cross-country backbone, and that the mixing creates "a tremendous problem with security." NDSU has dealt with the problem by creating a sophisticated system for verifying people's identities on the network. Helping researchers in many disciplines to manage their vast and expanding volumes of data is a more difficult problem, and one that the university is still trying to solve. Often researchers need help with programming or with databases to help them handle their data. "Those are really significant barriers," Mr. Wettstein says. Some colleges are trying to overcome the barriers by hiring full-time faculty and staff members with the skills needed for interdisciplinary research over high-speed networks. To do advanced-network research, "you need human resources -- the most critical resources," says David R. Alexander, a physics professor at Wichita State University who is director of its high-performance computing center. Instead of hiring a few postdoctoral fellows who will be gone after a few years, he says, it's better to use grant money to provide initial financing for new faculty positions. In some cases, simple measures can expand the amount and quality of faculty participation in Internet2, Mr. Alexander says. This spring, faculty members at Wichita State received mini-grants of $5,000 for coming up with ideas -- even modest ones -- for taking advantage of the university's Internet2 connection, which it has had for less than a year. Several of the grants were given to faculty members to buy high-speed videoconferencing equipment for conference rooms in their departments, with the idea that researchers would use videoconferencing to improve collaboration with colleagues at other institutions if the equipment was nearby and easy to use. More than one-third of the local network connections at Wichita State have been upgraded to carry 100 million bits of data per second, making them fast enough for researchers to take advantage of the university's Internet2 connection. The university also has a full-time system administrator who doubles as a trainer to help faculty members make optimal use of the connection and of a computational cluster located on the campus. "Three years ago, there was no high-performance computing at WSU," Mr. Alexander says. "We went from zero to 100 [faculty] users in six months' time." Mr. Alexander says the university has since spent more than $300,000 on Internet2 bandwidth and will continue to spend $150,000 to $200,000 a year for high-speed connections. It is a lot of money, he says, but it has greatly expanded faculty members' capacity for advanced research and teaching. "They can now think about bigger and more important problems," he says. The University of Georgia currently has only two "heavy hitters" -- an astrophysicist and a biochemist -- who make full use of its high-speed Internet2 connection, says David Matthews-Morgan, the university's director of networking. The university's technology managers say they probably deserve some blame for not making more faculty members aware of the university's Internet2 connection, which it has had since August 1999. One way the university has tackled the problem is by holding an Internet2 Day, a day it set aside in May for faculty members to come learn about Internet2. About 50 faculty members attended. "The day went very well," Mr. Matthews-Morgan says. But he does not think a single event was sufficient. "My gut feeling is that we're going to have to speak one-on-one with the research groups about what their needs are," he says. "It's going to be time-consuming." Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

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