CIT improvements helped bring inauguration to any person, anywhere

By Beth Goelzer Lyons

President Jeffrey Lehman's inauguration marked a first in ways both distant and very close. His was the first to begin outside the United States and it also was the first to be as close as the computer on your desk.

Four inauguration events -- the symposium and speech at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City, the academic procession and installation ceremony in Ithaca, the musical and theatrical extravaganza "Ezra and Andy's Excellent BIG RED Adventure" and the State of the University address -- could be watched via the Internet from anywhere in the world as they happened. Cornell Information Technologies (CIT), particularly its Distributed Learning Services (DLS) and Network and Communication Services (NCS) groups, made that "first" possible.

The DLS group, responsible for capturing the events as they unfolded, spent hundreds of hours preparing. A satellite dish was installed on the roof of Rhodes Hall on campus. A vendor who could support thousands of simultaneous Internet requests for video was lined up. Cameras, cables and connections were tested and retested. A way to link to the International Space Station was devised. Months of careful planning and work translated into seemingly effortless video playing on computers around the globe.

Equally successful was the performance of Cornell's own data network, as faculty, staff and students who couldn't go to the events tuned in on their computers or at three lecture halls on campus.

"If we had tried this in the past, network performance would have taken a hit once people started watching those events," said Don Schweikert, assistant director of network engineering at NCS. "That's because people at Cornell used to share their networking space. So if one person did something bandwidth-intensive, like watching a video, the network would be slower for everyone else. With our new switched networking, that doesn't happen."

From September 2002 through March 2003, in a $1.2 million project, CIT replaced the university's few remaining shared-10 mbps (megabits per second) Ethernet hubs with 10/100 Mbps switches. Nearly 20,000 active Ethernet ports were replaced and over 450 network switches installed in more than 100 buildings. The links between the buildings and central network are single-mode fiber now, boosting the bandwidth capacity from 100 Mbps (or even 10 Mbps in some places) to 1,000 Mbps (or one gigabit).

In translation, that means networks within buildings buzz along speedily whether two people or 50 happen to be watching inauguration events, sharing complex data sets with other researchers, taking distributed-learning courses or participating in Web-based meetings.

"We achieved top-quality results by planning what to do, in detail, down to the last wire," said Tom Theimer, senior project coordinator at NCS. "We had terrific teams working at 5:30 in the morning so no one would even notice. They knew what they had to do in a given week, and they decided how to get it done. This worked really well and kept the teams highly motivated."

It paid off for Cornell, too. The project was completed on time and under budget. The university received credit for much of the old equipment and will save $450,000 a year in maintenance costs. And its updated network records equal improved billing and faster resolution of network troubles.

Most important, the path to tapping the Internet for innovative, collaborative research, scholarship and community-building is now quite a bit smoother. And the university is well-positioned, not to mention well-staffed with seasoned and highly effective wiring pros, to begin the last key piece in Cornell's networking puzzle -- improved wiring and infrastructure in the buildings themselves.