August 2007 Innovative Technology recognition by Campus Technology magazine

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Innovation in Campus Information Technologies at Rice University

From Megabyte to Petabyte and beyond Technology Infrastructure


The campus network at Rice University serves over 9600 faculty, staff, students, and visitors.  The university’s Vision for the 21st century for education and research challenged us to upgrade the network.  We decided to forego traditional switched networking in order to leverage carrier class technology that virtualizes the network.  As the first academic institution to utilize MPLS VPNs, we created a state of the art network with 802.1x, guest wireless, centralized firewalls, and enterprise storage, and built a new data center.

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Long Distance Class with Yo Yo Ma

Rice Information Technology team members set up a high bandwidth audio and video connection across Internet 2.0 for Rice cello students at the Shepherd School of Music. The students participated in a master class with Yo Yo Ma offered by the New World Symphony in Florida. The event utilized the very high speed resources of Internet 2 to receive an uncompressed Digital Video (DV) stream and display it on a large screen monitor at the Shepherd School.

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Dual Desktops used in VNC Demonstration

Rice needed a Canadian researcher to demonstrate Web 2.0 applications, along with social aspects of computing. Since the speaker could not be on campus and there was a need to share both a talking head and desktop content, we used Virtual Network Computing (VNC, which is a graphical --GUI-- desktop sharing system). This enabled the speaker to control the machine in the presentation room, which was projected onto one of the displays; a second computer in the presentation room was then used as a video conference unit and its feed was projected onto a second display.

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Video Conferencing: Showing People and Screens

With the Innovate class for the engineering school, we use Polycom's people plus content video conferencing system to share high definition speaker desktops as well as the speaker video, in separate streams, with multiple video conferencing sites, facilitating distributed or shared teaching. Those talks are captured in digital video and shared through OWL-Space centered online repositories.

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What is Transpiring?

The scope of the network project:

  • Rice is the first University to implement MPLS (Multi Protocol Label Switching) VPNs (Virtual Private Networks). MPLS – provides network virtualization capabilities, allowing Rice to implement multiple networks on top of a single, highly-redundant, high-performance network hardware platform.  It virtualizes an enterprise network – a behind-the-scenes traffic control system providing options for redirection around bottlenecks, congestion, and broken links so that data and files keep moving to their destinations without apparent slow down.  (First academic institution to implement this.)
  • Rice is the first institution (commercial and non-commercial) to deploy CISCO’s layer -3 out of band NAC solution. Implementation of NAC/Cisco Clean Access essentially eradicated virus problems (never utilized before in an academic environment)
  • Rice is the only institution to combine both MPLS  VPNs and NAC.
  • 1400 miles of future-ready wiring for the new network
  • 50% of the campus has 10GB cabling (Rice only few educational institution deploying 10G cable) , the remainder has 4GB cabling
  • 63 buildings with new cables and addition and renovation closets
  • Wireless Campus and secured visitor access
  • 1444 Gigabyte Core backbone
  • 802.1x authentication authenticate hosts which are equipped with supplicant software, denying unauthorized access to the network. Secure 802.1x wireless network access as well as easy-to-use visitor wireless and allows mobility around the campus for entire campus community.
  • Wireless connectivity across 100% of the campus
  • Technology-enhanced classrooms and labs for “all” Registrar rooms
  • New Email system with large storage space
  • Blue Arc Storage solutions with a minimum 1GB space for undergraduate students, graduate students (2GB) staff and faculty (3GB)
  • Backup facility for the Rice community
  • DSPAM and Blacklisting remedies for campus spam management
  • Single Sign-On to reduce quantity of password and account names
  • Create network affinity groups for increased security
  • New large Data center facility (total building size 23,000 sq.ft.) to house all servers and high performance research computers such as the Cray XD1/AMD 336 Dual Core Opteron-based computer, the HP Itanium-based Rice TeraScale Cluster (RTC) and over 1200 additional processors.
  • The new infrastructure provides for disaster recovery and redundancy
  • A partnership between higher education institution and corporation (Rice, IBM, CISCO)

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Why now?

New leadership in the twilight hours of Rice’s first century set up a dramatic dawning for its second century of existence.  Rice’s new president, David W. Leebron, solicited for input from students, faculty, staff, board members and alumni resulting in the Vision for Rice’s 2nd Century, or the V2C.  Rice’s first president, Edgar O. Lovett, visited and studied the most renowned institutions of higher education around the world in 1908 before beginning plans for an ideal institute.  In a similar fashion, the V2C establishes a blueprint for the ideal university of the new millennium with celebration of centennial approaching in 2012.

What does it mean for day-to-day education and research at Rice?

With each day, Rice’s community becomes more and more dependent on the network.  Additional services become available online, university paper processes are moved to web-based applications, and performing daily business tasks “online” accelerates, becoming accepted as a routine part of our diverse endeavors (from sending email to high performance research) across and beyond the campus.

The goal of this three-year project is seamless connectivity for Rice’s information technologies.  According to Kamran Khan, Vice Provost for Information Technology:
 "When you flip the switch, you expect the lights to come on, right? And you expect to hear a dial tone when you pick up the phone handset," Khan said. "Rice users should expect and receive the same seamless connectivity with their computers and wireless devices anytime and anywhere on campus upon completion of the network upgrade." 

The design and architecture of the new network is designed to be future-ready and modular. "What we're building here is an expressway to the information highway that will help Rice keep pace with the continued accelerated use of future technologies," Khan said. Technologies for the future characteristically require increased performance, higher security, higher speed, greater stability and greater bandwidth to local, state, national and international networks.

As a research university, Rice has a technology infrastructure that is expected to respond not only to increasingly competitive global and environmental factors, but to the needs of the students, faculty and staff as well. Once the New Network Project is complete, Khan said, the entire Rice campus will be wireless, security will have been greatly enhanced and the improved collaborative capacity should have an immediate effect on several projects, including grid computing, bioengineering research, emerging digital libraries, the Connexions Project, the current Terascale and new high performance computing cluster, our collaborations with the Texas Medical Center, art history visual repositories and the Shepherd School of Music's live video conferencing events.

Italics above indicate excerpt from the September 1, 2005 Rice News article, New Network Project aims to improve IT for the future of Rice which can be found online at:
http://www.media.rice.edu/media/NewsBot.asp?MODE=VIEW&ID=7637&SnID=225704871

With the increased speed and bandwidth of the new network, these projects became possible:

  • The goal of online auditions for the Shepherd Music School requires high bandwidth to ensure music quality - at both ends, for sure, but we cannot do it if Rice's end is slow. The new network opens up possibilities for new media distributions using multicast for digital TV channels and Rice created content.
  • Visualization of geophysical data shared beyond the local graphics desk[top].  Researchers across the street at the Texas Medical Center, or around the world, will be able to see visualized results.
  • High definition video-conferencing especially “People plus Content” which can show a person talking while simultaneously showing the application (Matlab/PPT) they are presenting.
  • Digital asset creation, management and sharing: from Architecture’s incredibly large digital CAD files to the digital assets in Dspace/MDID, Art History and the Art Library, faculty, staff and students are moving and sharing GB-size file assets across the campus.
  • Support existing and new media initiatives including webcasting and podcasting: Rice captures and webcasts hundreds of events and lectures each year and 12 classrooms have recently been set up to automatically capture and podcasts lectures.

What does it mean from Students perspective or Cyber Life of Rice Students?

The ”cyber experiences” our students bring to our campus serve as another good indication of the types of services Rice needs to be prepared to support. We are now more focused on what we can learn from high school student experiences regarding the use of technologies from a learning and social perspective, and we are building the “campus digital life” that corresponds  to our technology infrastructure to meet their needs.  Our students are dependent on the internet for: Instant Messaging, music, video, TV episodes, wiki, blogs, facebook, myspace.com, YouTube, downloading classroom presentations and online audio and video streams, access to electronic resources in our library, digital libraries, online course management systems, online Google searches and tools, Tivo, Xbox, and more. Cell phone alerts and messages and campus activities and events are also dependent on online access.  Rice’s new infrastructure has been designed to add immediate capacity and to grow as the demand increases in this ever changing campus student life.

What does it mean for Rice “beyond the hedges?”

For years, Rice was a secluded haven for education and research, and the hedges planted and nurtured along the borders of the campus were a visible reminder of the exclusiveness of life “within the hedges.”  Just as the V2C challenges Rice students, researchers and faculty to reach out beyond the campus, so too the new network encourages connectivity across the street, across the city, and across the globe.

  • Collaboration --via high-performance research and education networks—is now possible through Rice’s membership in LEARN  (Lonestar Education and Research Network), RENoH (Research and Education Network of Houston) and the NLR (National Lambda Rail).  Although the interest in these networks has been high at Rice, the logistics of moving data from an old, slow network onto the high-performance networks were lacking. Rice now shares a 1Gigabyte pipe with other institutions in Texas to access Internet2.
  • Reducing choke points for data sharing across research and education networks; we need to push more data into these networks, getting files where they need to go (e.g. other research extensive institutions) without having to slow down at a small choke point where bandwidth is limited, as was the case with the previous network.  For example, we need to get telemetry data from weather data capture instruments quickly and process it all quickly in order to analyze the data and project weather within time constraints.
  • Participate in GRID computing collaborations: GRID computing is the distributed usage of processor cycles for image processing, rendering.   The new Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN will generate lots of data for processing. According to Dr. Paul Padley, Professor of Physics and Astronomy (Bonner Nuclear Lab), “We currently don't have capital or manpower to make significant contributions to this.  Our fallback is to remotely log on to an institution where the resources are available.   Any contributions that
    Rice IT can make to getting nodes on the LHC Grid and maintaining our presence there would represent an important contribution to the science being pursued at the LHC.”
  • Rice helps city of Houston create virtual museum.  Houston Mayor Bill White announced the creation of the online Museum of Houston, a cooperative effort among the city’s leading educational institutions, cultural organizations and public archives to create a digital storehouse of historic resources relating to Houston’s rich and colorful past. Rice University is collaborating on the project.
  • Travelers in the Middle East Archive (TIMEA) is a new digital archive at Rice’s Fondren Library; TIMEA is a virtual time machine for visiting the Middle East between the 18th and early 20th centuries via computer. This pilot project provides easy access to narrative texts, maps, photos, drawings, study guides and other resources related to travel in the Middle East several centuries ago.
  • Researchers who use High Performance Computing resources generate huge amounts of data on shared research computing resources and daily move files/results (typically hundreds of GBs / day) to local resources/computers.  So, e.g., moving one, 100 GB file at 100 Mb/sec vs. moving one, 100 GB file at 1 Gb/sec saves roughly two (2) hours of time. What would normally take 2.2 hours to move would now happen in less then 15 minutes.

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What is unique about the technology investment at Rice?

The blueprint for building the infrastructure not only involves replacement of one or two technologies but a major overhaul of integral academic, administrative and research cyber infrastructure at the same time. Rice partnered with IBM and CISCO, who became visible as full-time staff on our campus. The infrastructure is enabling the Rice community to access and manage accounts, email, calendaring, helpdesk, training, internet, web, labs, classroom, courseware, storage, on/off campus connections, VPN, printing, PDA integration, security, antivirus, access to research computing, purchase of hardware and software, video streaming and other services from their desktop and pervasive devices.  Collaboration around the globe, sharing resources and access to primary and secondary scholarly materials requires a integrated and holistic approach in architecting and designing an innovative infrastructure that is “future ready” and does not require a forklift replacement as in the past. Rice’s strategy and planning towards our e-Utility approach in building this infrastructure makes sense in terms of efficiency, support, increasing demand, management and maintenance, performance and the cost perspective.

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Additional resources:

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