Information Technology at Purdue

December 2001

2/20-21/2002 - Teaching Learning and Technology Showcase
Building on the success of four Teaching, Learning, and Technology Showcases from 1998 through 2001, the University is making plans to host the fifth annual event on February 20 and 21, 2002. TLT is an activity that focuses on the use of technology in instruction. This year we will kick off the two-day event with an exciting keynote presentation. Other planned events include electronic poster sessions, vendor demonstrations, campus support information booths, and workshops.
TLT Showcase Information

2/11/2002 - IT Information Exchange
Mark your calendars for February 11, 2002 when OVPIT will host an IT Information Exchange. The purpose of the IT Information Exchange is to enhance communications about IT initiatives at Purdue. The February session will include opening session remarks by our Vice President for Information Technology, Jim Bottum. Other sessions planned include an overview on campus IT projects, WebCT, TRAX, wireless technology at Purdue and E-commerce. Please watch for future information on how to participate in this event.

IT Strategic Planning Task Force Announced
An IT Strategic Planning Task Force has been formed to begin building a strategic plan for IT at Purdue. They held their first meeting on December 6, 2001. Plans are in process for publishing information on the ITaP web site. Visit the following URL to find out members of the committee.
IT Strategic Planning Task Force Members

Goner Virus
Many areas both on and off campus were subject to the "Goner" virus. We at Purdue got the word out pretty quickly. A big thanks to all those who helped spread the word and not the virus. If you would like more information about the virus or virus protection, please visit the web site at:
Information on Goner Virus
Purdue's Site-licensed Antivirus Product

Digital Course Tool Offers Virtual Gold Mine
About 600 Purdue instructors and 19,000 students were online this semester using Web-based software to do course-related work. If the recent trend continues, there will be quite a few more than that next semester.

They all are using WebCT, the software of choice at Purdue. The course-tool software simplifies many tasks that instructors and students once did exclusively on paper or only during class time. Inside Purdue recently published a story on the use of WebCT. For complete coverage please visit:
Inside Purdue Article on WebCT Project
Information on WebCT

OVPIT Hosts Open Town Hall Meeting
The Office of the Vice President for Information Technology hosted two town hall meeting to continue open discussion on the integrated organization. Staff from the OVPIT organization as well as the distributed IT areas were invited.

The second session was video taped. If you were unable to make it to either of the meetings and would like to view the tape, please contact jkercher@purdue.edu.
Slides from the Town Hall Meeting
I-Light
I-Light is a new optical fiber network that links Indiana University Bloomington, IUPUI, and Purdue University's West Lafayette campus to each other, as well as to the national Internet infrastructure, including Internet2. Funded with a $5.3 million state appropriation by the Indiana General Assembly in 1999, construction of the network was recently completed. Governor O'Bannon symbolically lit the fiber of the I-Light Network in today's ceremony.

I-Light will significantly reduce the barriers for digital collaboration between these two great universities, across three campuses, and will permit them to grow closer together, to partner on more research projects and further build on their complementary strengths. I-Light will also act as a digital on-ramp, extending access to advanced networks further into the heart of the State. For more information, please link to one of the following web sites:
Press Release for I-Light Dedication
Indiana Optical Fiber Initiative
SuperComputing Online Article with FAQ
I-Light Pics from Purdue Site
ResNet Open Forum to Address Student's Concerns
The Office of the Vice President for Information Technology and University Residences have been working together to investigate a number of issues users have had with ResNet Internet access. The two offices co-hosted an open forum for ResNet users on Wednesday November 28th, 2001 in Stewart Center.

Our goal of the forum was to help explain the issues surrounding the operation of ResNet to users. Communication and Outreach is very important to the Office of the Vice President for Information Technology. Holding forums such as these are just one way of reaching out to enhance two-way communications. We have also met with a number of users to discuss their individual experiences.

Students and ResNet users attended the forum to learn more about the current state of the network and efforts under discussion to improve the quality of service. Participants were encouraged to share their viewpoints.

A myriad of technologies and policies to deal with this issue have been adopted on other campuses. Our analysis of peer institutions indicates that a number of them have adopted rate limiting policies. The goal of our efforts is to develop technically valid and fiscally sound solutions to improve the quality of ResNet service.

The Exponent's recap of the event can be found at the following URL:
Forum addresses students' concerns
Current ResNet Traffic Shaping Policy
Visit the ResNet Site for Slides from the Forum
IBM SP Upgrade In Progress "New Applications and Friendly Users" Being Sought
IBM awarded Purdue a Shared University Research (SUR) grant for 2001 which has been used to upgrade the IBM SP supercomputer. Two large symmetric multi-processor (SMP) nodes were installed on Monday, December 17, 2001. The addition of these nodes, each of which contains sixteen 375 MHz Power3+ processors, increases the SP's performance on the LINPACK benchmark used by the maintainers of the TOP500 list from 257 to approximately 290 Gflops. (A Gflop is one billion floating-point operations per second.)

When fully configured sometime in January, 2002, each of these new nodes will contain 64 GB of memory and have access to more than 360 GB of directly-attached, high-performance disk storage. The large memory, processor count, and storage available on these nodes will enable computing not possible on the SP prior to this upgrade. Examples include parallel applications with large memory requirements that do not scale well on distributed-memory systems and those that do large amounts of message passing or process large amounts of data.

We are seeking researchers with these types of applications to work with IT Research Computing Services staff and move rapidly onto the new nodes, document porting issues they encounter, and provide feedback about their experiences. These early, "friendly users" will help us shake down the upgraded SP system and lead the way for others needing the resources it provides.

If you would like to participate in this early-access program, please send a description of your application and how it would use these nodes to Bill Whitson, Interim AVP for IT Research Computing Services, at wiw@purdue.edu.
INITA invites Educators to Become CyberStars
The Indiana Information Technology Association (INITA) is now accepting applications for the Educational Contribution to Information Technology category of the 2002 CyberStar Awards. The CyberStar Awards honor, celebrate and publicize the state's top information technology companies, products and individuals.

To qualify for this award, the nominee must be an educator or program associated with an Indiana educational institution. The winner will demonstrate excellence in the promotion and/or use of technology in the academic realm.

Nominees should demonstrate success in one or more of the following areas: educational opportunities, research, program growth, student success or outstanding leadership. At the judges' discretion, up to one winner and up to two finalists may be named in one or both K-12 and higher education.

INITA and Andersen will present the awards during the third annual CyberStar Awards Gala at the Indiana Roof Ballroom on Friday, May 17, 2002. At the event, INITA will recognize up to three finalists and name a winner in each category. In addition to the awards presentation, the evening will feature a cocktail reception, elegant dinner and entertainment.

Nominees do not have to be members of the Indiana Information Technology Association and anyone may nominate another party provided that all required information is supplied. Self-nominations and past CyberStar Award winners are welcome to participate.

To request an application, please contact Megan Graves, Events & Programs Coordinator for INITA, at 317.275.2087 or mgraves@inita.org. Applications can also be downloaded from www.initacyberstar.org. Deadline for submissions is Friday, January 18, 2002.

For more information about CyberStar 2002, go to www.initacyberstar.org INITA is the voice of Indiana's IT industry. INITA's nearly 350 member companies represent the diversity of the IT industry in Indiana and the businesses serving them. Member needs drive the association's initiatives, programs and services. For more information about INITA, call 317.275.2080 or visit the web site at www.inita.org.

Storage Area Network (SAN)
OVPIT is pleased to announce a joint venture with EMC to provide Purdue University with a data storage solution that begins implementation in December 2001. This solution incorporates two 19 Terabyte capable SAN (Storage Area Network) devices that will be located in the Math and Freehafer buildings respectively.

This implementation will provide many benefits and offer new features to the University. The SAN implementation will reduce overall storage costs by increasing disk utilization, reducing administrative overhead and reducing future hardware requirements. The SAN also provides increased flexibility by accommodating for future growth in high performance disk space. Once the SAN implementation is complete the two units will incorporate a hot mirroring feature which will provide the University with new capabilities in the area of disaster recovery. Infrastructure for Identification, Authentication
and Authorization (I2A2)
OVPIT is currently in the process of establishing a deployment team for I2A2, that will be made up of people from various areas within ITaP. I2A2 is a support system developed at Purdue to help data systems control resources. It enables them to identify who is asking for resources, prove the declared identity, and determine what access rights for the identity. The identity key used by I2A2 is a public number called the Purdue University Identifier (PUID). A permanent PUID is assigned to each person having a relationship with Purdue. The PUID contains nine characters. The I2A2 infrastructure has an Oracle database for storing PUID information, and network access to three fast database managers (DBMs) with text-based and secure (SSL) network interfaces and a simple protocol.

One DBM serves identification requests: I2A2 identification is the process of determining the PUID of a person making a request for resources. If the person knows their PUID, no further I2A2 action is needed. If the PUID isn't known, I2A2 will help determine it by some other personal key, such as name, coordinated PUCC career account alias, human resources identification number (HRID), or student identification number (SID).

A second, authentication challenges: Authenticating is proving an identity. The person offering the identity is asked to supply some secret token that proves the declaration of identity is correct. Often the token is a password, but it can be a public key infrastructure (PKI) X.509 certificate or some other form of privately owned information that substantiates the identity's ownership.

A third, authorization queries: Authorization determines that the proven identity has some set of characteristics associated with it that gives it the right to access the requested resources. The I2A2 authorizer DBM supports authorization tests by maintaining a set of associations with every PUID. The associations are called characteristics. A characteristic describes something associated with the PUID or the person identified by the PUID. Most characteristics are derived from official University records, but there are provisions in I2A2 for establishing private characteristics.

Apache web server modules, libraries, and code samples are offered to help developers enable I2A2 access from their systems.
Wireless Technology - Taking the Next Step
In January, 2002, the first phase of a campus-wide wireless networking deployment will begin. The deployment will be launched as a prototype project within IT at Purdue. The participants in the prototype project will be comprised of a partnership between the Office of the Vice President for Information Technology and several academic schools and departments. Initial participants will include representatives from the Schools of Engineering, the School of Science, the School of Agriculture, and the Purdue University Libraries.

The prototype project will have two primary goals. The first will be to plan and implement a substantial, coordinated expansion of the small-scale wireless networking projects that have been implemented by several groups on campus. Specifically, the project will take what has been collectively learned from these school and departmental implementations and move to the next logical deployment scale prior to initiating a complete campus-wide implementation.

The second goal of the prototype project will be to develop and recommend a set of wireless computing policies and standards for the campus. These standards and policies will include the specific access and security mechanisms that will be required to permit students, faculty, and staff to utilize wireless networked devices in a seamless way within buildings throughout the campus.

This wireless technology prototype project will be organized and managed as an emerging technology project within the Office of the Vice President for Information Technology. A technical advisory council, made up of representatives from various academic schools and administrative units, will be established to provide advice and recommendations to the project on wireless policy, security and deployment issues.
ITaP Web Site
We are happy to announce the ITaP web site was put into production this week. The web site is a result of phase I efforts for establishing a skeleton version of the ITaP web site. Phase I concentrated on developing and publishing the ITaP website based on the services OVPIT provides. It established a framework and initial templates for others to use for future website development.

In January 2002 we will launch phase II of the ITaP web site efforts. Phase II includes marketing the ITaP website and engaging the ITaP community in further enhancements, review, and refinement. We encourage wide spread participation as we extend the ITaP website beyond the OVPIT services. Phase II will also define content and knowledgebase management strategies for implementation. Please bookmark the ITaP website found at:
ITaP Website
HPCwire Free On-Line News Service
HPCwire is offering free subscriptions to those with an email address ending in ".edu". These subscriptions should be good through February 2002. They may be good longer pending a decision by the company to extend the program beyond February.

HPCwire is the worldwide journal of record for all aspects of the (H)igh (P)erformance (C)omputing industry and community. Devoted primarily to ongoing developments across the entire spectrum of computationally-intensive hardware, software, and integrated systems technology, HPCwire also covers related business, corporate, economic, security and governmental news. It is delivered worldwide each Friday via e-mail and the World Wide Web.

According to their promotion you will have unlimited access to all HPCwire articles via email and on the Web. For a free subscription, send a blank message with a subject line of "PURDUE.EDU" to edu@hpcwire.com. In response, you should receive a "Welcome to HPCwire" mailing saying your HPCwire subscription will be activated within 48 hours. You will receive further information with your an activation notice once that has occurred.
HPCwire
Security Memorandum of Understanding Developed
A memorandum of understanding (MOU) has been formulated for how the University's information security functions should be structured and deployed. The potential benefits of pooling information security resources at Purdue are huge, and include:

Improved risk containment through better incident handling. Improved data quality, which implies better metrics. IT tangible cost savings through increased standardization in Security policies, procedures, software, and hardware across the University. Please visit the following URL to read the MOU.
CERIAS OVPIT MOU

Telecomm Community Planner Joins Purdue's OVPIT
The Office of the Vice President for Information Technology is pleased to announce that Stephen Mayo has joined the team as the Associate Vice President for Telecommunications. "Building a world class IT infrastructure must include a strong telecommunications component," says Jim Bottum, Vice President for Information Technology. "We were looking for someone who could provide vision, leadership, people skills, and deployment skills in voice, data and video convergence. Steve Mayo fits that description.

Steve's background, character, and experience in planning and implementing telecommunication communities in the commercial, government and higher education sectors will be invaluable as we develop and implement a strategic plan for IT at Purdue". Mr. Mayo is one of the leading technology consultants focusing on "last mile" strategies for mixed use, master-planned communities.

Over the past 29 years, Mr. Mayo has implemented and managed large-scale networks for a variety of companies, institutions, and communities. In 1998 Steve created Inteleconnect, Inc. to focus on technology solutions for residential communities, businesses, and commercial developments defining and implementing next generation telecommunications platforms. His most recent project includes developing a strategic plan to provide a "next-generation" telecommunications platform for voice, video, and high-speed (Gigabit Ethernet) Internet access in a 1100-acre development for 12,000 residential units and 6 million square feet of commercial space. The site was originally selected as the corporate headquarters and studio for DreamWorks, but later reverted to a leased studio facility. The commercial property is targeted specifically at the entertainment market.

Steve's commercial telecommunications knowledge is strengthened by his experience with government agencies and higher education. Mr. Mayo has provided consulting and design services for the State of Michigan developing the strategic plan and design for the proposed Michigan statewide broadband network, identified and defined the service capabilities of the private and public telecommunications providers within the state, and developed the feasibility study and cost models to build a statewide network for education, government, libraries, and rural healthcare.

In 1996, Mr. Mayo joined CampusLink Communications Systems, Inc. as Chief Operating Officer where he was responsible for the operations of the company, which provided and managed turnkey information technology systems to colleges and universities.

In 1984, Mr. Mayo joined the University of Michigan to build and manage what was then widely acknowledged as the largest, single-site telecommunications system in the country. He was responsible for telecommunications marketing, vendor and government relations, customer service, and products and services for the students, faculty, and staff. During this time he also served as Vice President of the Michigan Collegiate Telecommunications Association providing direction on networking and distance learning for U of M and the other 60+ member colleges.

Mr. Mayo has a BA in Business Management from Eastern Michigan University and a 4-year major in Russian Language from Syracuse University. Steve spent four years in the US Air Force as a Russian linguist and was honorably discharged in 1970. Steve's appointment as Associate Vice President for Telecommunications will become effective December 6th on a half time basis. He will begin work full time January 8, 2002.

Buying A Home Computer this Holiday Season?
Sometimes, all of the terms related to buying a computer are confusing. Click on the link below to find out information that might be helpful if you are thinking about buying a computer this holiday season. We would like to thank Ernie Poland, our ITaP partner in Housing and Food Services Computing area for supplying this information.

We would also like to thank John O'Malley and our ITaP partners in Liberal Arts for providing another informative link on buying a new computer.

The Gateway store in Tippecanoe Mall offers a 6% price discount to Purdue employees. You will need to let them make a copy of your Purdue ID card.

For Dell Computers you can go to www.Dell.com, click on the Education button, then click on Higher Education Student Faculty and Staff programs. There you will see exclusive general discounts on Dell consumer equipment.

School of Liberal Arts Link on Buying New ComputersBuying a Computer During the 2001 Holiday Season
Dell Web Site
Gateway Web Site
Apple's Web Site