Network-Intensive Research At Memorial University

Bruce Mann, Mark Whitmore & Wilf Bussey

Memorial University of Newfoundland

Abstract

Memorial University of Newfoundland recently competed against other Canadian universities for an infrastructure grant to finance an upgrade to the research component of its campus computer network. The odds were terrible- only a 30% chance of beating the competition. Despite the odds, Memorial’s application was successful, garnering over $822,000. to support network-intensive research at the university (Mann, Whitmore, Bussey & Keough, 2000). This paper will describe the kind of research the infrastructure grant will support.

The Problem

At Memorial University of Newfoundland, research and critical resources are distributed across campus in a variety of disciplines and interdisciplinary fields. Memorial has a node on the national network of high performance computers, and is a leading participant in C3.ca. Internal network upgrades are essential to our role in this organization, and to the efficient use of the 20% of the CFI-funded resources that they were required to provide to outside users.

When it was installed three years ago, Memorial’s ATM campus network “MUNet”, was at the leading edge of university networks. Now it is swamped by network traffic. Congestion had become a major impediment to research carried out all across campus, preventing new research projects from being initiated. A detailed analysis of network traffic confirmed this, and projections indicated further degradation in the coming months unless action was taken immediately (Bussey, 1999). The details are available at www.mun.ca/cc /

A second factor affecting successful network-intensive research at Memorial has been Internet access speed. Memorial has been connected to the Internet at four megabits per second (Mbps). By 1999 standards, four Mbps service was the lowest of the top ten universities in the Maclean's comprehensive university ranking, although several Ontario universities have been using five Mbps services. Notably, universities in British Columbia and Quebec have very large regional network connections; a minimum of one hundred and fifty-five Mbps, which subsequently links to the Internet. Bussey (1999) determined that Memorial's standard Internet access was operating at speeds two orders of magnitude lower than any other university of its kind, and pays prohibitively more for that dubious privilege.

With an upgraded campus computer network, Memorial can replace all network hubs and associated devices with switched 10/100 ethernet. The ATM backbone may be upgraded, but it is much more likely that we will replace it with gigabit Ethernet technology, primarily for cost reasons. That decision will be made as a result of responses to our request for proposals. With the added total estimated cost of $2.5M (for administration and teaching), the campus network upgrade will support the advanced research network needs of the institution, and allow researchers in other institutions to access the improved research resources available at Memorial.

Network-Intensive Research

Networked computers are essential and integral components of research at Memorial University. The research is distributed across campus and in a variety of disciplinary-based and interdisciplinary fields. Like the researchers, the resources are distributed all across campus and shared by participants to optimize their use.

For example, numerical modeling is carried out in engineering, computer science, physics, applied mathematics, chemistry, physical oceanography and earth sciences. The computational resources are distributed all across campus. Research capabilities have been limited by difficulties in sharing large data files, and in visualization. Information has been lost because of the inability to transfer, visualize and hence analyze large data files. Although a new computer server with real time visualization capabilities has been installed, its efficient use demands much greater bandwidth. The new upgrade promises more effectiveness and efficiency of computing resources.

Memorial University offers Canada’s first interdisciplinary graduate programme in computational science. The programme emphasizes research applications of numerical modeling and visualization. Much of the faculty and graduate student research in computational science requires remote use of resources. Until now however, insufficient bandwidth has limited the options for research in this field.

Some researchers in philosophy, psychology, education, mathematics and medicine at Memorial share research interests in applied cognitive science. One of the biggest, and most critical areas of shared interest in this group has been human attention. Attention is critical to perception, human factors, and multimedia learning research. Quick response time from the computer network is vital to the proper assessment of interactions developed on the computer interface.

Similarly, speech synthesis research is carried out in Linguistics, Education and Management Information Science (within the Business Faculty). Speech synthesis has various applications including event-notification, prompting from voice response systems, and as an interface to an order-verification system. Enhanced network capability is required in this research for extended applications. Efficient and effective sharing of computing resources requires connectivity and adequate bandwidth. It is also important to save the results in databases accessible to other researchers and students.

Research Benefits

By international standards, Memorial University of Newfoundland consistently publishes highly innovative disciplinary and cross-disciplinary research which was having a major positive impact on society. Memorial has taken advantage of its prime location to develop major centres of excellence in ocean research. Research at the Centre for Cold Ocean Resources Engineering (C-CORE) includes remote sensing target detection, shore-based ground wave radar technology used for long-range detection of ice hazards, and Coastal Ocean Dynamics Applications Radar (CODAR). C-CORE was also the site of Canada's largest centrifuge facility which expands C-CORE's strengths in cold ocean science, space and environmental fields. C-CORE also undertakes image processing projects in many areas including mining automation, industrial inspection and robotics. These projects require large databases of images that typically reside on a single computer but which must be accessed but many members of a project team. A high-speed network will decrease the time necessary for testing image processing algorithms on these large databases of images, thus increasing overall efficiency.

The theoretical condensed matter physics group consists of three faculty members (Lagowski, Whitehead and Whitmore) and their research groups. Their work includes numerical investigations of various systems at the atomic and mesoscopic scales, including thin film magnetic systems, phospholipid bilayers, and specialty polymers. In the studies of magnetic systems, the subtle interplay between the long-range dipolar interaction and the short-range exchange interaction plays a key role. The underlying physics is fundamental in determining the structure and morphology of a wide range of important systems in the physical and biological sciences, including spin glasses, superconductors, liquid crystals, polymers and biological membranes. In polymer and lipid systems, they are addressing fundamental questions about the validity of mean field theory and the range of applicability of various theoretical techniques, many of which apply in certain limiting cases. The work aims to understand the data from experiments on novel systems, which were not described well by other existing theories. It helps to quantify the limitations of the other theories, and to provide insight into real systems. They were also carrying out an extensive computational investigation of the best theoretical method for understanding the electronic structure of organic molecular solids, which cannot be understood using single-electron theories. This work could have a profound effect on understanding and predicting ability for the properties of polymer materials.

The objective of the computational chemistry group (Poirier and collaborators) was to develop a unified theory of chemical reactivity and stability. There were disparate views in the literature on the factors that control regio- and stereo-selectivity in the Diels-Alder reaction. The first step in developing a unified theory requires an understanding of the factors that control selectivity. Such theory should make it possible not only to rationalize the selectivity, but also to make predictions. This understanding was crucial in synthetic chemistry. This research involves structure optimization, the development of new algorithms and better and new ways of analysing and presenting the results. Hence, the research has an important "computational science" component to it. A long-term goal is to develop a modern, “intelligent” program and improve every aspect of the ab initio calculations. A modern scientific program must be efficient, flexible, user- and programmer-friendly, take advantage of vector and parallel processing, use modern "Object-Oriented" methods and the most current programming developments, be interfaced with databases and visualization tools. Our ab initio program “Mungauss” is being developed to incorporate these features.

Pike and Shalaby’s (Mathematics) work in graph theory and combinatorial design theory, focuses on graph decompositions and construction of various combinatorial objects, with applications in coding theory and cryptography. The computational aspects of the research use parallel processing, involves several machines distributed across the campus. Results thus far have included new discoveries concerning perfect 1-factorisations of complete graphs as well as Skolem sequences. Task distributing across a network of workstations can be an attractive alternative to ‘monolithic’ high-performance computing. A high-speed network was, however, a critical requirement. In many cases, it was the communication latency of the network that determines the performance of the whole application. In such cases, a reduction of the communication delays by an order of magnitude can result in a comparable performance improvement, all without any increase of the performance of the processors. The research conducted by Zuberek’s group (Computer Science) clearly indicates that, in many cases, the speedup of distributed applications was limited by the performance of the communication network. The value of his future research relies on a significant improvement on the campus network used to carry it out.

Also in Computer Science,Yuan’s group works in the interdisciplinary field of Virtual Assembly (VM). VM uses Virtual Reality technology and integrates diverse manufacturing-related technologies to accommodate the visualization of interacting production processes, process planning, scheduling, assembly planning, logistics from the line to the enterprise, and related processes such as accounting, purchasing, and management. The group started a pilot project on VM a number of years ago and has been investigating issues of virtual factories, such as object-oriented workflow management. Its application will make "e-Factories" a standard practice in the near future, in analogy with the creation of "e-Business” by the internet.

The applied seismology group currently includes 3 faculty members, (Hall, Hurich and Wright). An important fourth was to be appointed to the Petro Canada Research Chair in Applied Seismology, previously occupied by L. Lines. The group has marine and land multi-channel seismic acquisition equipment; and has used a mixture of computing resources for seismic data. The group works on seismic applications to regional tectonics (e.g., LITHOPROBE), to sedimentary basin history (e.g., eastern Mediterranean), Appalachian basins, Atlantic margin basins, and to shallow mineral-oriented targets (mining camps, Buchans, NF, for example). The group has interests in both numerical and analog modelling, and relating the results to physical properties and to seismic wave scattering. The group has an international reputation in regional scale tectonic applications of seismology, and has recently become internationally established in the narrower field of petroleum seismology, especially through the Memorial University Seismic Imaging Consortium (MUSIC), which was sponsored by industry, with NSERC matching grants. MUSIC remains active while they complete the search for Lines’ replacement, and they anticipate that the next chair holder will continue to build the group's international recognition.

Hans Rollmann, a Professor of Religious Studies, has pioneered the use of the Internet in a successful electronic Scholars' Seminar in American Church History in 1997/8, which involves participants from Alaska to Texas and from California to Newfoundland. The seminar relies on computing and network resources offered by Memorial University. The resulting papers and a critical edition of an important North American historical ecumenical text will appear this year in print in the monograph series of the American Theological Library Association. Dr. Rollmann intends to repeat such a seminar in 2000/2001 in collaboration with Dr. Thomas Olbricht of Maine and is in need of improved collaborative connections to expand and improve the delivery and scope the Scholars' Seminars.

Don Nichol uses the Internet and WWW every day to connect with book-trade historians and 18th-century scholars around the world either directly or through the 18th-century Bulletin Board. The Internet critical for gathering information important to his research on the history of copyright, and for maintaining contact with contributors, publishers, conference organizers and the like. I also rely on it heavily on the availability of e-texts for tracking-down quotations from Shakespeare, and a tailor-made concordances to Milton's *Paradise Lost*.

Venkatesan (Engineering) is an expert in Broadband Communications Networks. Architecture, analysis and VLSI design of switch fabrics for broadband communication networks (ATM, IP, ...etc); design of switch fabrics, buffers and schedulers for provisioning of Quality of Service issues in broadband communication networks; architecture and applications of parallel processing systems. Most of the research in this area has been theoretical analysis, software and hardware design. Access to a high speed network will be useful in checking some of the proposed algorithms and devices designed and fabricated at Memorial; and traffic pattern analysis studies that can be facilitated.

Howard Heys (Engineering) is a specialist in Communications Security. The principal focus of the research is computer and network security with foci on cryptography and the application of encryption to broadband communication networks. In recent years, the work has involved several graduate students theses and about 3 or 4 senior undergraduate projects per year. Much of the research to date has focused on the theoretical analysis and design of encryption algorithms. Access to a high-speed network will benefit the research program by facilitating the ability to test proposed methods and implementations of encryption applications on real networks.

Sandra LeFort (Nursing) is funded under the Medical Research Council of Canada to carry out a multi-site evaluation of the chronic pain self-management program. This requires the transfer of data collected at each site into the Nursing Research Unit at Memorial University. Sites were in Newfoundland & Labrador and in Ontario.

Sandra MacDonald (Nursing) has been funded by provincial community health boards to undertake health needs assessments of the population in several areas of Newfoundland and Labrador. Several projects focus on community health needs and resource assessment in the western region, the St. John's region, the central region, and for Labrador Health Services. The outcome will be a large database located inthea Nursing Research Unit that will be accessed by other researchers doing studies in this area.

Shirley Solberg (Nursing) is funded by the Maritime Centre for Excellence in Women's Health to study rural women and breast cancer self-help group via audio teleconferencing. Dr. Solberg has developed this new area of research to provide support to women using telecommunications technology. Data in the form of video taping of interviews and large transcripts of interviews need to be accessed by the Nursing Research Unit for analysis. Dr. Solberg has also received another grant to establish a satellite for behaviour studies of Cancer Patients. She will require linkages with the primary site in Ontario as well as all the other satellite centres in Canada.

Alice Gaudine (Nursing) is funded by SSHRC to undertake study on decreasing employee absenteeism through feedback and goal setting, and feedback and relapse prevention. Dr.Gaudine utilizes a number of institutional settings for her studies and large amounts of data sent to the Nursing Research Unit at Memorial for analysis.

Roger Green (Medicine) works in the Medical Genetics Research Group. Medical genetic research at Memorial is moving into an area that requires access to large databases. High-speed access is also required from sites on campus, within Newfoundland, and from other regions of Canada. The databases will be linked to other datasets at remote sites. Some of the data will be in the form of images (X-rays, ECG data etc.), which will require wide bandwidth. The availability of high-speed communication will be essential to the implementation of our plans over the next several years.

Jorge Segovia (Medicine) of the Health and Medical Care (HMC) Research Group, Division of Community Health (Memorial University, conducts research in medical care utilization, health status, and lifestyle. The HMC follows a longitudinal design and uses a large sample size to develop and test models of medical care utilization, using the quantity and pattern of medical service utilization. These are collected by linking health surveys with medical care utilization databases.

Tom Scott (Medicine) evaluates the educational impact of web-based teaching materials for first and second year medical students and multi disciplinary study groups. Learning exercises are completed online and submitted answers were automatically emailed to the course organizer. The exercises are used for second year courses in gastroenterology, endocrinology, women's health and musculoskeletal. Network access is important to the planning, delivery and evaluation of a multidisciplinary projects in which medical, social work, nursing and pharmacy students work in groups to carry out case studies, with one group of nursing students at the Sir Wilfrid Grenfell College in Corner Brook participating entirely online.

Bruce Mann's research is focused on the relative effectiveness of learning from multimedia presented on the World Wide Web. At the current rate of technological development, it is clear that continued testing of his taxonomy will require the new, faster, less congested computer network to better control confounding factors in Web-based learning.

Murray, Pullman, Simpson, and Turner in Social & Health Psychology, have received $383,000 in SSHRC funding to investigate socio-cultural variations in health beliefs and values. Again, the improved campus network at Memorial University is expected to improve cross-campus collaboration between the researchers.

Conclusion

Memorial University of Newfoundland is the largest university east of Montreal, and one of the most important research facilities in the Atlantic region. Memorial has six faculties (arts, science, education, medicine, engineering and applied science, and business administration) and seven schools (graduate studies, nursing, physical education, recreation and athletics, social work, continuing education, music and pharmacy). Memorial University is engaged in inter-disciplinary academic research in a broad range of academic disciplines. Highlighted were some of the research initiatives ongoing on campus. This paper has shown that networked computers have become an essential and integral component to all of these initiatives.

References

Bussey, W. (1999). Managing Internet access. Policy document. St. John’s: Memorial University.

Mann, B., Whitmore, M., Bussey, W., & Keough, K. (2000). MUNet II campus upgrade: Computer network-intensive research at Memorial University. Ottawa, ON: Grant application to the Canada Foundation for Innovation. August.