The network infrastructure available to us forms an integral and exciting aspect of our collaboratory project. Briefly, we have access to a variety of network technologies that we can use to demonstrate that our collaboratory can be successfully deployed across a wide range of underlying network infrastructures, from a switched 100 megabit Ethernet LAN environment, to OC-3/OC-12 Packet-over-Sonet WANs, to Digital Subscriber Links (DSLs), to ubiquitous and relatively low-bandwidth 56kb dial-up modem links.
We are fortunate that UCSF is a founding member of the Corporation of Education Network Initiative in California (CENIC), a non-profit organization that is a partnership between academia and the telecommunications and network industries in the California. CENIC and its industrial partners have recent built CalREN-2, a very-high speed backbone network serving the needs of higher education in the state.
The interactive graphics workstations in the RBVI Resource Center are connected to CalREN-2 via a dedicated OC-3 (155 Mbps) ``Packet-over-Sonet'' network link. We have also enhanced our local area network infrastructure through the acquisition of a high-speed packet switch with both gigabit Ethernet and fast Ethernet ports. This network infrastructure provides support for several collaboratory modeling sessions simultaneously, both within our own LAN environment for development and testing purposes, as well as within the wide-area network environment in support of testbed applications.
Laboratory Overview | Research | Outreach & Training | Available Resources | Visitors Center | Search
