Documents Contributed by ECAR, Advanced Networking, and Network Infrastructure and Equipment

This is the June 2004 ECAR survey instrument used for ECAR Research Study on Networking in Higher Education.

This ECAR research study is designed to illuminate a host of current network management practices related to IT in higher education; opportunities for connectivity to external networks; the institutional context of organization, leadership, and management; current and emerging technologies and converged networks; and the future of networking. The study is based on five major research initiatives: a literature review; consultation with the EDUCAUSE Net@EDU Integrated Communications Solutions Working Group; survey responses from 517 chief information officers and network directors in higher education; qualitative interviews with 12 higher education leaders about their view of the future of IT networking in higher education; and three in-depth cases studies involving four U.S. institutions and SURF, a Dutch higher education and research partnership.

This ECAR roadmap is designed to illuminate a host of current network management practices related to IT in higher education; opportunities for connectivity to external networks; the institutional context of organization, leadership and management; current emerging technologies and converged networks; and the future of networking. The roadmap is based on five major research initiatives: a literature review, consultation with the EDUCAUSE Net@EDU Integrated Communications Solutions Working Group, survey responses from 517 chief information officers and network directors in higher education, qualitative interviews with 12 higher education leaders about their view of the future of IT networking in higher education, and three in-depth cases studies involving four U.S. institutions and SURF, a Dutch higher education and research partnership.

Presentation at the November 2004 ECAR Symposium. In the past 20 years, we have seen the establishment of the global Internet and the Web. We are now seeing the emergence of universal grid infrastructure, providing researchers from many disciplines interactive visual access to remote scientific instruments and enormous distributed data archives. Smarr believes this will induce another transition in campus infrastructure, perhaps on a larger scale than previously, due to the creation of optical networking "clear channels" or "lambdas" across the campus, state, nation, and globe whose entire bandwidth can be dedicated to a single campus researcher. In the United States, the backbone is the recently live National LambdaRail, which is linked to the international Global Lambda Integrated Facility. Smarr discusses examples of applications that require "personal lambdas" and reviews some of the research on how to couple these enormous data pipes across campuses to link into the clusters of individual laboratories.