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.kha...@rit.edu Http: www.rit.edu/~gskpop
