To build the infrastructure, the university obtained a Science and Research Infrastructure grant to find a solution that would see it through at least the next five years. This meant a multi-gigabit backbone -- driven, says Wearsma, by grid computing.
Network integrator Pervasive Networks won the contract with its proposal to install a 25,000-outlet, 10Gb backbone based on Foundry Networks equipment that the university will in future be able to upgrade to 40Gb bandwidth using Foundry's MG8 technology.
"All manufacturers will have new hardware in the next five years so we were keen to see roadmaps," says Wearsma. "Foundry were willing to show us their roadmaps." For a multi-gigabit backbone, Wearsma was expecting to be given trunk gigabit -- essentially a number of 1Gbps backbones bundled together -- but, he says, Foundry and Pervasive came along with 10Gbps from day one. There are some 100 switches on the network, with 10/100Mbps Ethernet to the desktop and the potential for Gigabit to the desktop -- or to the 300 servers connected to the network. Between the two campuses lies 2km of dark fibre.
Wearsma reckons he got a good deal on the upgrade. "We happened to be in a buyer's market so there was some very aggressive bidding. Only academic institutions like ourselves have been on the market -- big corporations have been holding back a bit." Wearsma got the network for a cool AU$7 million, and thinks it was worth it.
"We have a number of parallel processing machines, and a large 200-node Linux-based cluster in earth sciences," he says. "Processing jobs from this are then offloaded at Gigabit speeds on to the WAN -- this is a great example of grid computing. One development project in here is an access control program that goes round looking for spare computing cycles and can distribute work loads. Earth sciences has vast amounts of data that needs to be mined, and this all makes it far easier."
7%
3%
