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UIC Networking: Faster, Bigger, Better |
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Nothing's slow about the pace of change in the computer business, and that's even more true about networking. The centerpiece of the new and recent changes at the ADN is a $300K National Science Foundation grant to improve our external connections for both commodity traffic and specialized research needs. This grant dovetails well with other improvements at UIC to help bring solid networking to everyone who needs it. (For online info about the grant, see the URL: http://www.uic.edu/depts/adn/nsfgrant/; for a map showing the current ADN backbone network, see The New UIC ADN Network.) |
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| Improving Our On- and Off-Campus Connections | ||||
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The first part of the NSF grant involves connecting UIC to the vBNS. The vBNS,
or very high-speed Backbone Network Service, is the National Science Foundation's
newest attempt to construct a state-of-the-art network to connect far-flung researchers
to the NSF national supercomputer centers. This was NSFNet's original purpose,
but NSFNet grew up and became the Internet, so the NSF properly relegated it to
commercial concerns.
With the development of the vBNS, the NSF continues to concentrate on the experimental end of internetworking. Because of our existing network infrastructure, UIC was the first campus in the country (after the supercomputer centers) to physically connect to the new vBNS. But the NSF is also interested in how research campuses mingle their high-end research traffic with commodity Internet traffic. So the UIC NSF grant also covers:
Our links to the Chicago NAP and the vBNS are clearly important to UIC's high-end research groups, but they are also important to us general users because our Internet traffic will flow through them. Our campus used to be connected to the outside world through two T1 lines, a total of 3 Mbps. In the new arrangement, we're tripling that by connecting to a new ISP (Internet Service Provider) at the NAP and dedicating a 10 Mbps slice from our existing OC3 line to that connection. And in the future, expanding that pipe will be easy -- we can just call up the ISP and begin paying them more money! Moving our Internet connection to an ISP at the NAP will also benefit people who connect to UIC from home using a commercial ISP, since the connection between their ISP and UIC will be faster. (This is provided, of course, that the ISP also connects to the Internet at the NAP. The majority of them do.) The remainder of the OC3 line to the NAP is used for high-end research, either on the vBNS or directly with other campuses such as the Metropolitan Research and Education Network (MREN) consortium, which consists of Argonne, Fermi Lab, Northwestern, the University of Chicago, the Canadian Network for the Advancement of Research, Industry, and Education (CANARIE), and UIC. The magic that lets us conveniently "slice-and-dice" network capacity is called ATM, or Asynchronous Transfer Mode, which is introduced in Building the Data Highway. We've been operating an experimental ATM network for a while now, and we have begun to use it to carry most of our off-campus traffic. We also use ATM for certain segments of our backbone. (See The New UIC ADN Network for a map of the current ADN backbone.) ATM is particularly good at carrying voice, video, and computer data together, and at working over different speed networks. It's too expensive to bring to the desktop yet (except for a few high-end researchers), but its effects on the backbone, now and increasingly in the future, will be felt by everyone. |
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| Other Network Upgrades | ||||
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Of course we've also been quite busy wiring buildings and adding labs. We now
have over 14,000 connections on campus, have added a lab in CCC and have upgraded
labs in SRH and BGRC. There's lots more on the drawing board. In addition, the
personal computers in some of the new labs are now connected to the campus network
with switched ethernet hubs. This makes each
computer in the lab think it is on a subnet by itself, which relieves some of
the contention in the lab's network and allows the network to run at a much higher
percentage of its theoretical maximum capacity. An additional advantage is that
it doesn't require any changes in the lab machines or their hardware (including
their ethernet card).
As we add and improve the public labs, we've added more file servers to handle the load. Similar servers handle the increase in Server Services, our program of bringing software over the Net to individuals and departments that don't want to run their own servers. Server Services was offered free for all the ITIP machines for one year and is used by many others as well. Another important network improvement, funded by Interim Provost John Wanat, is that our connections with the UIC College of Medicine campuses in Rockford and Peoria have been upgraded to T1 (1.5 Mbps) links. This will finally make possible some experiments in video teleconferencing. We've had a busy and productive year, and next year will be more of the same. We'll have more connections, more switched ethernet hubs, more public labs, more throughput on the backbone, more experiments in network video, and just more bits flowing. More users, each needing more services, equals more demand. So far, we have a good chance of keeping up with it. Comments are welcome; send them to |
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| The ADN Connection, Nov/Dec 1996 | Previous: Nov/Dec 1996 Contents | Next: Building the Data Highway |
| 2000-1-19 connect@uic.edu |
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