First Year Activity

Major activities during this year have included the detailed planning to establish a regional cooperative aggregation point with the University of Alabama and the University of Alabama at Birmingham. These activities have generated an organizational structure and level of cooperation that was essential in generating the RFP for services. Highly favorable terms have been a result of this cooperation. Additionally, we have establish the detailed planning and negotiation to obtain highly favorable terms for local services. Finally, we have established an on-going high-performance networking group that draws participants from federal, state, and local government organizations.

In order to use the ITC^Deltacom connection, UAH would have had to incur a large local-loop cost. However, the City of Huntsville was able to provide us with the assistance that we needed to minimize the local-loop costs. As various vendors of data and communication services placed their fiber-optic cables around the city, they used the city right-of-way. For this the city affixed a franchise fee. Part of this fee was the setting aside of fiber for the City’s use. The City provided the fiber for the use of this project. This fiber connects the main UAH campus, the GCG, the AREN building, and the ITC^Deltacom building to the City of Huntsville Data Center. These were dark fiber connections that required horizontal boring, fiber pulling, fiber splicing, and termination in addition to ‘lighting’ the fiber. The construction aspect of this project is nearly complete and we anticipate this part of the connection to be operational in the Spring of 1999.

UAH has made various contacts through its High Performance Network group that may lead to additional research efforts. Additional proposals have been made to NSF. UAH in cooperation with the University of Alabama (Tuscallosa) and the University of Alabama at Birmingham obtained a planning contract for NGI activities with the Software Engineering Directorate of the Air and Missile Command located at Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama. The period of performance was July 1, 1998 to September 1, 1998 and the approximate value was $95,000.

Contributions within discipline
Providing a high performance network for information technology research will be a significant contribution to this discipline. Further the investigations of topologies, technologies, and protocols should lead to a body of 'lessons learned' that will be an asset for future endeavors in this area. Research continues on brokered multi-cast.

Contributions to other disciplines
The availability of a high performance network will change the manner is which teaching and research are conducted. In all of the fields of the university there will be an increase in performance that will make multimedia products, interactive products, and collaborative products possible. Additionally the transport and use of very large data sets will be greatly enhanced.

Contribution to education and human resources
There is wide spread interest in distant learning and collaborative learning. Early experiments with video teleconferencing and internet chat sessions with K-12 students demonstrated the power and utility of distance learning for younger students. This has lead to further investigations and initial discussion of placing the state-wide interactive Intercampus Interactive Telecommunications System (IITS) as a service with-in the GCG. Many of the GCG meetings used the IITS and members were able to better understand its strength and weakness. We believe that incorporating this service within a high performance network will ameliorate the weaknesses and enhance the strengths. Further, efforts in distance and collaborative learning are continuing.

Contribution to resources for science and technology
The vBNS grant will make it possible for researchers to share in a timely fashion their activities. For example, we are now investigating the manner in which the NGI high performance networks can be used for the near real time distribution of research experiment data from the International Space Station. The intent of this grant is to build Multi-network Infrastructure for Research. As such we believe that when operational the combination of the HuntNet and GCG will provide a cost-effective and sharable resources for research.

Contributions beyond science and engineering
The most significant contribution beyond the technical arena is a demonstration of the power of cooperation. The cooperation among government institutions has led to the formation of the HPNG that has enhanced the understanding of the technical, research, social, economic, and political issues associated with high performance networks. The cooperation between the City of Huntsville and UAH has lead to the formation of the HuntNet which will provide high-performance network capabilities in a cost effective and sustainable manner. The cooperation of UA, UAB, and UAH has lead to the formation of the GCG which will provide high-performance network connections to the vBNS and SoX that are cost effective and sustainable. The cooperation between UAH, HuntNet, GCG and AREN holds the promise of expanding the benefits of this work to larger audiences and enhances the potential for sustainable high performance networks within the state.