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05/05/2005
Tech Corner

Board approves funds for campus network

This article and others can be found on the Rice News site.

By Carlyn Chatfield

Recognizing the vital role of a robust computer infrastructure in the current and future endeavors of Rice faculty, staff and students, the Rice University Board of Trustees recently approved funding for a new campus network and the acquisition of a data center.

Kamran Khan, vice provost for Information Technology (IT), said the network and the data center create the infrastructure that Rice needs to fulfill its academic, scholarship, research, administrative and service requirements. "As we move forward to build the network and data center, we must keep in mind the overall planning and strategies, the IT big picture: the infrastructure is an enabler for enriching teaching, research and the learning experience and for innovations to take place," Khan said. "We must also provide the infrastructure our students expect for the same reasons. An enhanced learning environment provides opportunities for collaboration and integration that will enable us to support a world-class research environment as we leverage technologies."

Rick Peterson, director for Academic and Research Computing, said networks connect people, and they provide the mechanism for archiving and sharing an ever-increasing amount of data, information and knowledge.

"In order to create and disseminate new knowledge, educators and researchers need a solid network that works for them, allowing access to primary and secondary scholarly materials, providing connections to colleagues for collaborative efforts and providing a mechanism for them to share their insights and experience with interested learners," Peterson said. "Creating a new network infrastructure here at Rice will provide both a robust and reliable network, accompanied by an increased capacity to enhance learning and research."

Participation in joint projects and access to an accumulation of current and historic assets are vital to ongoing research and instruction. Networks provide the means to connect with both local and global colleagues and projects. "Without a reliable and fast network infrastructure, people stop trusting their ability to use the network to collaborate, they stop taking advantage of shared network resources and they begin living their technological life on an island that extends not much beyond their office," Peterson said.

Island life may not sound so bad, but Peterson said the campus must share its resources and make the many and varied resources, systems and services available on the Web and from various research networks available to faculty, students and staff.

As more Rice educators and researchers tap into the campus network for their work, the strain on existing resources begins to affect everyone who uses the network. "We need to add more capacity to reliable networks to keep ahead of demand," Peterson said. "The current 'commodity' Internet is only about 10 years old, and it is already so saturated with traffic that it is largely unusable for many research and collaborative efforts. It has been and will continue to be higher education's role to push the capacity of networks and stay ahead of the commodity curve.

But even if Rice can provide adequate local network capacity, collaboration with colleagues and projects external to the university requires a different level of network participation. "Perhaps one of the most important points - given Rice's past and current role - is the need to advance knowledge in the state of networks themselves, to provide a platform for research into high-performance networks and provide support for new scientific research applications that run on advanced networks. This work will impact everyone and will make the creation of dynamic new applications across all disciplines, some of which we cannot even imagine," Peterson said.

This article and others can be found on the Rice News site.

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