[AG-TECH] AG Centralisation

[Markus Buchhorn]

G'day all

I totally agree with Don's questions :-) and would scale them even further. 
On our side of the Pacific we're considering not just a national AG 
infrastructure within each of several countries (AU, JP, etc.) but also a 
regional-international one perhaps under APAN. Within Australia we're 
considering coordinating perhaps 6-10 AG nodes in the near future on our 
I2-equivalent network(s), and providing support, purchase leverage, 
management (perhaps a national AG-NOC?) as well as domestic and regional 
(international) "venues". Having everybody in the same set of timezones is 
very helpful, especially for support, and more importantly large-scale 
distributed events are likelier/easier to take place within that timezone 
region.

Just as Don states, this all very preliminary still, but it is important to 
understand where everybody else is heading.

I'd be very interested to hear how people see the future of this 
infrastructure, and how to scale it up to 100's (and more) of nodes around 
the world one day. I'm sure there's some vendors who'd have some 
suggestions :-)

Cheers,
         Markus

At 05:05 PM 18/10/2001 -0600, Don Morton wrote:
>All,
>
>Where does ANL see the future of AG "support" going?  A few of us in
>the western states have discussed the notion that we'd like to be
>doing more regional collaboration over the AG and, in the long
>term, "maybe" it would be beneficial to all if we looked at the prospects
>of creating our own venues, with our own machines, etc.  This is all
>VERY PRELIMINARY thinking, not at all thought out but, clearly
>ANL must have put some thought into how all these new nodes would
>be handled, scheduled, etc.
>
>- Does ANL "want" to be the centre of activity for this expanding AG?
>- Does ANL "want" to have some centralised control over AG activities?
>- Does ANL wonder how in heck it ever got into this support role and
>   want a way out???? :) :) :)
>- Does ANL have any interest in seeing regional groups set up their own
>   infrastructures, thus offloading some of the demand from them?
[...]

Markus Buchhorn, Faculty of Engineering and IT,          | Ph: +61 2 61258810
email: markus.buchhorn at anu.edu.au, mail: CSIT Bldg #108  |Fax: +61 2 61259805
Australian National University, Canberra 0200, Australia |Mobile: 0417 281429