Project Introduction

The current Internet lacks applications with the capability to access and process very large complex data sets. The research effort of scientists and engineers is hampered by their inability to manipulate large data sets over the Internet. Therefore, fostered by the Knowledge and Distributed Intelligence Initiative (KDI) of the National Science Foundation, the next generation of the Internet is underdevelopment.

The University of Wyoming (UW) needs to enhance its connectivity and supercomputer access. These assets are viewed as essential components of our future research competitiveness and as significant tools for faculty recruitment and retention to enhance the vitality of our institution into the 21st century. Although Wyoming is an EPSCoR state, we have moved aggressively forward to position ourselves favorably in the areas of computational science and its derivatives across the many disciplines. Infrastructure building that removes barriers to competitiveness is a cornerstone of Wyoming’s EPSCoR initiative. Our present narrow bandwidth, relatively long latency access to the Internet and our present limited ability to connect with supercomputing facilities are barriers we must overcome. Gaining such access and connectivity will enhance the University of Wyoming’s competitiveness. As a demonstration of our commitment in these areas, UW is a charter member of both the Internet2 Consortium (http://www.internet2.edu) and the University Consortium on Geographic Information Science (http://www.ucgis.org) both of which are advancing a substantial research agenda focusing on distributed computing, data representation, cognition of spatial/visual data, interoperability and scale. In addition to these areas, UW researchers are doing research in other areas described below where improved connectivity and supercomputing resources are essential.

The University of Wyoming needs better connectivity, both as a means of accessing applications and instrumentation at other sites, and as a means of serving large data sets, applications, and interactive computing to other sites. UW has installed a sophisticated campus network using a 155 Mbps ATM to connect our buildings. Workstations have at least10 Mbps pipes to the ATM campus backbone and a few machines such as our SGI Power Challenges have 100 Mbps connectivity. Most buildings with high use applications on campus have Cisco Catalyst 3000 switches to route traffic. UW’s Internet connectivity is based on two T1 connections through U.S. Sprint. We hope to upgrade this connectivity to T3 early in 1998. Even T3 connectivity will quickly become a limiting factor for our. This proposal outlines the University of Wyoming’s plans to improve its connectivity, and thereby enhance our ability to perform competitive research.