[AG-TECH] a campus-wide architecture for AG?

[gurcharan khanna]

hello,

i wonder if anyone has any thoughts or experience on the following proposal.

i propose to set up a campus wide infrastructure based on AG technology. 
practically,
this means setting up a dozen sites around campus. while a bunch of 
independent nodes
is easy to imagine, in this case i would want to manage all the nodes 
centrally as much
as possible--they would all be under a single operations center. so, 
what are the issues
of scaling to this level? i can imagine things like efficient ways to 
re-image systems,
centralizing the compute power, perhaps sending raw video rather than 
encoded to the
ops center, ability to monitor remote nodes' status, central content 
programming for all
the nodes for default persistent viewing, 24/7 node displays when no 
specific event is
occurring, etc. etc.

essentially, what kinds of things should i be thinking about? what might 
i do differently
for this purpose? my thoughts run to centralization of the heavy lifting 
and 'thin client'
nodes, but i haven't worked through the details of what that would look 
like. so i'm
just throwing that out for feedback and discussion.

we currently have four persistent nodes up at RIT. the traditional setup 
works ok but
just barely as we try to keep things in sync and always on and in the 
right venue (we're
using vnc to monitor the remote nodes manually).

all this is effort and thinking is also driven by May 3, 2008 which will 
be an "innovation
and creativity" festival at RIT where 30,000 visitors are expected. for 
that, my vision is
to connect a dozen sites on campus as well three regional sites along 
with 3-5 sites
outside the US where RIT has a presence (Kosovo, Dubrovnik, Dubai, Dominican
Republic, and maybe China). of course, this should all be in HD 
uncompressed -)
so, i'll need a 40 Gbps lambda just for this video traffic! no problem!

if you've read this far i might as well mention that we are starting 
next month to try
to implement uncompressed HD over 10 GigE networks (we got almost $500K in
equipment from Cisco Research). not sure how to integrate that into AG 
but need to
figure that out before May!

well, that's enought for now -)

thanks,

-gurcharan

-- 
-------------------------
Gurcharan S. Khanna, Ph.D.
Director of Research Computing
Office of the Vice President for Research

Director, Interactive Collaboration Environments Laboratory,
Center for the Advancing the Study of Cyberinfrastructure
---
Rochester Institute of Technology
1 Lomb Memorial Drive
Rochester, New York 14623-5603
Phone: 585-475-7504  ~  Cell: 585-451-8370
Email: gurcharan.khanna at rit.edu
Http:  www.rit.edu/~gskpop