Internet2

IT Home For Students For Faculty/Staff Resources Projects About IT Contact Us

The University of Mississippi and the Mississippi Center for Supercomputing Research, which have a long history of successful collaborative technology efforts within the State, are committed to working with other universities and groups necessary to achieve Internet2 connectivity. Several ongoing and planned research efforts will require bandwidth and far beyond that now provided by the commodity Internet.

The Mississippi Center for Supercomputing Research (MCSR) was established at the University of Mississippi in 1987 by The Mississippi Legislature, with an initial appropriation of $2.6 million, in response to a donation, from Standard Oil of Ohio, of a CDC Cyber 205 vector supercomputer. This system, valued at the time at about $16 million, was augmented by an additional gift from Control Data Corporation of mainframe, peripherals, and communication equipment. The MCSR was charged with providing high performance computing support to all of the educational and state agency entities within the State. The Center was also to provide support to business and industry in Mississippi, through access to high performance computing and by training students in the use of this emerging technology. The MCSR continues to be funded by direct State appropriation annually, and by additional financial support for personnel and utility services from UM in the amount of approximately $2 million per year. The Center has been very successful in its mission to provide excellent high performance computing support to Mississippi universities at the lowest possible cost to the State. It currently supports faculty research contracts and grants, which total over $30 million per year, at Mississippi State University, Jackson State University, the University of Southern Mississippi, as well as at the University of Mississippi and the University of Mississippi Medical Center, located in Jackson, MS. It has also provided leadership throughout the State and region in the implementation and proliferation of WAN and LAN facilities and services.

The MCSR was fully operational in January, 1988. The UM campus telecommunications infrastructure began to change dramatically with the initial installation of fiber optic connections to research departments requiring 10 Mbps Ethernet access. The Center and UM were connected to BITNET (CREN) by 56Kbps leased line, for remote access from other Mississippi universities. Remote access was substantially improved in 1989 with a SURAnet T1 connection.

Throughout these early years of the MCSR, staff members worked closely with other research and regional universities within the State to develop their network capabilities. The Mississippi Higher Education Research Network (MISNET) Policy and Planning Committee was formed by the IHL Research Consortium to plan for the deployment of the Internet within the higher education community, and to promote this development in community colleges, K-12's, and state agencies. The Department of Defense Major Shared Resource Centers (DoD MSRC's) at the Stennis Labs/NAVOCEANO in Bay St. Louis and the Waterways Experiment Station (WES) in Vicksburg also participated in MISNET. Staff members from the MCSR and UM helped initiate and provide continuing leadership for MISNET. MISNET served as a forum for network technology discussions and hosted telecommunications vendor presentations, e.g., SURANet, BBN-Planet and Bell South. Planning for state-wide networking for all agencies and institutions was assumed by the Mississippi Department of Information Technology Services (ITS) after the implementation of the State Backbone. ITS is responsible for oversight and planning for computing and telecommunications activities in all state agencies and institutions, including universities. The Mississippi Institutions of Higher Learning (IHL) technology staff funded an MCSR project to assist the regional universities with their initial connections to the Internet (SURAnet) in 1994-95. Mississippi Valley State University, Delta State University, and Alcorn University were connected to SURAnet and began their planning processes for deploying fiber optic cabling and building wiring/LAN's. This project also assisted them with local education and training for faculty, staff, and students in LAN development, TCP/IP, and PC network applications, such as WWW, E-mail, and List Services. UM telecommunications engineers planned and installed the first fiber cable installations on the Alcorn University campus in 1995.

The MCSR continued to upgrade the high performance computing facilities available in support of research at the IHL's in Mississippi. Cray Y-MP and J-90 systems were installed in 1994, along with SGI Unix servers, which provided scalar and graphics applications support. In 1997, a Cray C-98 system was installed, along with upgrades to the SGI IRIX facilities, including a new SGI Origin 2000 system. In the Fall of 1999, the MCSR upgraded both the vector and parallel computation facilities. The MSCR and UM Internet connection was upgraded to a Frame Relay DS-3 connection in January of 1997, to provide necessary bandwidth, since the existing T1 was fully saturated.

The Mississippi Department of Information Technology Services (ITS) deployed a Frame Relay backbone network with Bell South DS-3 and DS-1 facilities in FY95-96. This state-funded effort was the culmination of a major and unprecedented collaboration between IHL's, community colleges, libraries, K-12's, Mississippi ETV and state agencies. UM and MSCR staff members participated in several planning committees which contributed to this final implementation, that also included a Frame Relay DS-3 connection to the Internet via a BBN-Planet POP in Atlanta, GA. Initial plans for a more ambitious IHL-only fiber network gave way to a less expensive, but more inclusive, and fully funded, state backbone. The State Legislature has continued to fund this project through ITS and to support collaborative technology efforts within state government. The Director of the MCSR, Mr. David Roach, served as a board member for ITS from the time of his appointment by the Governor in 1994 until the expiration of his term in 2005.

The state backbone now includes a separate compressed video network, composed of point-to-point DS-1's and V-Tel CODEC's. Bell South, who was recently awarded the ITS contract for this network for the next five years, plans to upgrade the network from Frame Relay to ATM, with OC-3c connectivity, within the next two years, allowing the data and video backbones to be merged.